


burn down the beach for glass under your feet

by evocates



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Ableism, Backstory, Chinese Culture, Chinese Language, Class Differences, Class Issues, Codependency, Consent Issues, Explicit Consent, Explicit Consent for Reasons No One Should Give Consent About, M/M, Temple Politics, What Are Happy Endings, What Are Non-Ambiguous Endings, What Are Sad Endings, Worldbuilding, internalized ableism, this fic can be summed up as "sweet fluff that turns into acid right when you're not expecting it"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-16
Updated: 2017-04-28
Packaged: 2018-10-19 16:17:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10643529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evocates/pseuds/evocates
Summary: The Force equalised all. The Force took no sides. Baze knew all that.But Baze had learned from Ah Qi long ago: service must be repaid. If not, then those who served had no recourse but to be helpless fools.And Chirrut was no fool.The twisting darkness of devotion; the strangling desperation of faith. Baze and Chirrut through the years.(What does it truly mean to go where he goes? The answer: intense co-dependency.)





	1. 不忠家, “unfaithful to the family”

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kaboomslang](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaboomslang/gifts).



> For the April fightbackfic, kaboomslang/skinks asked for a fic with Baze/Chirrut, co-dependency, and a relationship so intense that it becomes unhealthy. That is, to put it lightly, exactly my shit. (See my magnum opus so far: _a fever of the mad,_ written for the _Hamilton_ fandom.)
> 
> This fic is partly a darker, expanded version of _a bridge of birds_ , partly me fulfilling Jo’s request, and partly me trying my best to write Baze/Chirrut in a way that _I_ will be completely happy with. 
> 
> **Warnings:** A _ton_ of references to Chinese culture, probably more intense than _a bridge of birds_ and _the greedy wolf and the judge_ combined. More significantly, however, this is not your usual feel-good ship. This is your feel-good ship made into something that’s rather terrible. In my beta’s words: “love hurts.”
> 
> Further warnings can be found in the individual chapters that have them.

“Good luck, little sister.”  
_  
The man he told you has the face of a friend has said, rebellions are built on hope. That man, you know, will not think of love; his heart is burning so bright and hot for his cause that his every move stinks of his fear of scalding all those who dare come near enough to touch._

_But you are not him. You hold on tight to the half-real echoes of that beloved voice stretching out with tremulous timbres to another, to one who is not you. And you know:_

_Love needs a foundation of hope to stand on._

_You have always been selfish. Now you are again, placing another burden on the shoulders of a wisp of a girl with dangling roots instead of feet. Her shoulders are thin, but surely the muscles are made of twined titanium, capable of bearing the weight of a man._

_So you hope. You hope and you think, Please. Please live, please win. Please turn solid so he can hold onto you, too._

_When his gaze turns back to you like it always does, you feel it on your chest. Heavy enough to choke._

__***

Chirrut surely did not remember the first time they met, but Baze did.

Here: the centre of Jedha City, where all buildings were squat and grey, a stretch of cloud-laden sky turned upside down with crawling roots sinking deep into sand. Only the Temple of the Whills rose high upwards, the red bricks of its roofs gleaming underneath the sunlight like dawn captured and made eternal by the soft voices chanting prayers that emanated from its walls at all hours of the day.

Baze was on the street, taking careful steps so he would not stain his white socks, when dust and sand exploded in front of him. He was young, then, the braid swinging behind him barely reaching beyond mid-back, and he hadn’t learned the reflexes to dodge.

Seated on the ground, hopelessly filthy, Baze stared at the boy standing in front of him. Whippet-thin, with dark eyes and the gaunt cheekbones of the starving, he was grinning and showing off his missing teeth. Half-naked, his ribs jutted out, pale streaks against dark tan, and he had a few fruits wrapped up in a grey robe that Baze recognised immediately as the uniform of the orphans of the city.

“You fuckers are so slow!” the boy yelled. He plucked a gourd from the pile held close to his chest, and bit down on it. The thick, bitter skin gave way beneath his teeth, juices exploding red all over his mouth. Baze continued to stare.

Suddenly, the boy took notice of him. His dark eyes darted down to meet Baze’s, and he grinned with yellowed teeth stained with red. “Here,” he said, and tossed the half-eaten gourd in Baze’s direction. Then he started running again, down the streets and then hopping up the barrels of nearby stalls until he was back on the rooftop again. 

“少爷,” the voice of his personal valet broke Baze out of his revelry, and he stared up with eyes wide and unblinking at the old man. “Are you alright?”

“Yes,” Baze said, absentmindedly nudging at Ah Qi’s leg so he wouldn’t get into the way of the police officers who were now running down the street, shaking their batons and yelling in Cantonese. “But the trip to the Temple will have to be postponed until tomorrow.”

He was too dirty now; dust and dirt clung over every inch of his skin, and the gourd’s juices had soaked into the front of his white changshan. Someone of his blood and rank could not be seen in the Temple in any state other than pristine cleanliness.

“This is all Ah Qi’s fault,” the old man shook his head, lips pulled down in self-reproach. “I should have insisted harder that you should stay in the sedan chair to the gates, 少爷.”

“That would be counterproductive,” Baze said, only paying half-attention to the conversation. “There will be no sincerity in the respects I pay to the Temple if I arrive clean and untouched by efforts not my own.” 

There were a couple of police officers hanging onto the awning of the rooftop where the boy was standing, yelling and pointing while the boy laughed at them, rolling around on the grey flat ground and caking dirt even deeper into his skin. He looked to be Baze’s age. 

A familiar discomfort tugged deep inside Baze again; a half-formed voice that croaked indecipherable words whenever Baze looked at boys from the orphanage. They were formed much of the same way, and yet there was an immeasurable gulf between them, wider than the physical distance between their bodies. 

As he watched, the boy ran away, leaping across rooftops. His brown legs flashed through the wings of the robes that he had hiked up to mid-thigh.

He was headed in the direction of the Temple. Baze imagined those dirty feet upon the Temple’s floors; imagined the boy eating his stolen fruits right in front of the grand kyber crystal that stood in the front hall, standing close enough that the juices splattered on the blue. 

Strangely, he found himself having to hide a smile.

“Do you believe, Ah Qi,” Baze said, voice contemplative, “that the Force equalises everyone?”

Ah Qi’s eyes darted around them. “少爷,” he said, voice lowered into a whisper. “That is dangerous talk.”

Baze turned his eyes towards the man for a long moment. Ah Qi was an old man, having served Baze’s family for his entire life like his father and mother, and liked their fathers and mothers before them had. He was an old man the precepts told Baze he should respect but whom Baze addressed by name; an old man who spoke of himself in third-person and never used Baze’s name in return.

“You speak Cantonese, Ah Qi,” Baze said, eyes lingering on the bangs that barely brushed Ah Qi’s eyes, so different from his own shaven crown. “Will you teach me?”

“That is…” Ah Qi sighed, and shook his head. “Ah Qi thinks that you have been out in the sun for far too long, 少爷, or you’re dizzied by the street rat knocking you to the ground. You should not think of such things.”

They spoke Mandarin: 国语; the official language of the city, the city’s language even though Basic was spoken more often and was far more useful. The other languages did not have nearly as much prestige, and the other _dialects_ …

Baze smiled. “Of course,” he said. He swept out the hems of his changshan, and headed towards the sedan chair. “Let’s head back, Ah Qi. I will make my visit to the Temple tomorrow instead.”

He pretended to not hear Ah Qi’s sigh behind him.

Later, when he had reached home and handed his dirtied clothes and socks and shoes for the servants to clean, Baze sat in his personal study. He looked out to his family’s gardens, at the rich fruits that grew outside, made possible by the high glass dome that surrounded the entirety of the estate, controlling the environment, and the water that his father and his father’s father status afforded them.

Some of those fruits would fall to the soil. They would be picked up by the servants, and then pulped to be fed back to the ground. The servants would not touch them. Like Ah Qi, none of them would ever think about doing so.

The poor outside his family’s gates would not be able to even see those fruits. 

In the Temple, the first prayer taught to the novices by the Master Guardians was, _I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me. The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force_.

To be one with the Force was to give oneself up entirely to it. To sink into its depth, and allow oneself to be swept away by the waves, giving up all of one’s worldly cares. All those who devoted themselves to the Temple must surrender their worldly possessions, though they were still allowed to keep their ties with those outside of the Temple itself. 

Some, like the Jedi of legends far away from the city, yielded everything.

Within the confines of his family’s estate, surrounded by glass, Baze could not see the skies of Jedha clearly. Even NaJedha, the great gas giant that they revolved around, looked distorted by the glass that encased him, protected him.

Baze folded back his sleeve, and he picked up his brush. On thick paper and heavy ink, he tried to pen down his thoughts.

They took the form of a boy, standing tall on a rooftop, mouth spread wide into a grin that showed his missing teeth and bloodied gums. Red on his lips, bruised fruits in his arms. The sun and NaJedha behind him, one on either side.

And the Temple, behind him, its red roofs level with the ragged, tangled hairs that fell over his eyes. 

***

The second time Baze met Chirrut was the meeting that Chirrut would, later, insist was the first time.

He was inside the Temple, having finished paying his respects to the Master Guardians, when he heard a commotion at the entrance. The acolyte he was speaking to made a deep bow towards him, sputtering excuses, but Baze made a dismissive wave and followed him to the source of the disturbance.

It was the boy; that boy whose image had been seared into his mind. His arms were caught by two men wearing the uniforms of the Jedhan police force, and another man, dressed in grey robes and thus likely to be one of the workers at the city’s orphanage, had his loose, tangled hair in a tight grip.

“We have already told you that we do not taken in those who are unwilling,” the master abbot said. She was a tall, thin woman with sharp bones that jutted at the jaw and a pair of piercing dark eyes. Her figure cut even deeper into the mind with her black robes, the darkness entirely uninterrupted by colour unlike the rest of the Guardians and acolytes. 

Her skin was dark, and Akshara was the only name by which she was known.

“But Master Abbot,” the orphanage worker started.

“To stay in the Temple of the Whills is to serve the Force,” the master abbot said, voice implacably rolling over his. “To serve the Force is to give oneself up to it. That is impossible for one that is unwilling.”

For reasons Baze would understand only later, the boy started to laugh. 

It was a loud, raucous sound; impossible rudeness forced into bullets spat from his throat. He bared his teeth.

“Nice of you to start talking about the Force,” the boy said. His Basic was not halting like most of those on Jedha’s streets, instead smooth and heavily tinged by Cantonese in a way that fitted the dark fire of his eyes. “Must be nice to have nothing else to worry about.” 

Something in those words sparked something within Baze. He had not wish to interfere – he was here, after all, as representative of his family, and it would not do for him to say anything that would possibly bring them shame – but he found himself taking a step forward anyway.

“If you stay here, and give yourself willingly to the Force, then you will no longer have to steal,” he said. “The Force equalises. No one will look down on you again once you decide to serve the Force.” 

The boy, he noticed, was more than half a head shorter than he was. But the way he drew himself back up made the height difference almost insignificant.

“That’s rich coming from a _siu je_ like you,” he sneered, throwing Baze’s title into his face with nearly enough force to make him rear back. “It’s all good for you to talk about how the Force equalises when you sit in your pretty mansion.”

Before anyone could react, he leapt forward, wrenching his arms out of the grip of the police officers. He grabbed Baze’s changshan, dragging the white cloth forward.

His dirty fingers left streaks of rust-red and dirt-brown on the cloth. The colours of old, dried blood.

“You want to talk me into joining this Temple, then you do it too,” he said, palms flat against Baze’s chest to try to shove him away. “You give up everything to come live like a monk, and then you come talk to me about the Force equalising everyone.”

“Okay,” Baze heard himself say.

“What?” the boy blinked. His grip slackened on Baze. Before he could stumble, Baze caught hold of his elbow and shoulder, steadying him.

Turning to the master abbot, he met those narrowed eyes squarely. “Will you let him stay here for the three days while I get my affairs into order?” he asked her. After a pause, he continued. “Will you allow me to join the order, as well?” 

“ _Nei faat san ging_!” the boy cried. Baze might not understand Cantonese, but his trembling voice and wide eyes spoke well enough. He did not look at him, keeping his eyes on the master abbot.

“All those who have a sincere wish to join the Temple of the Whills are welcome to do so,” she said, voice deep and low. “However, we do not accept those who come to our doors due to debt, or some sort of dare.”

“This is not a dare,” Baze said. He jerked his chin towards the boy. “He is right. I should not have spoken of the power of the Force while surrounded by luxury.” He did not say, _I have been thinking about this a long time_ , because it would be a lie.

But he knew, _knew_ with the same certainty that kyber was blue, that this was what he was meant to do. This was where he was meant to be. The sight of the boy in front of him, the image of him in his mind, had been the harbingers of his destiny.

“Will you be willing to stay, if I do?”

“I think that you’re crazy,” the boy said. But for the first time since they met, he looked uncertain, one canine peeking out from behind his strangely-plush lip. “Why the hell would you do that for me?”

Perhaps Baze should say, _I would’ve done this for anyone_ , but that would be a lie. _I don’t know_ was the most accurate answer, but he was hesitant to voice it.

“Because you’re right,” he said instead, and watched as the boy’s brow furrowed even further. He ducked his head, reaching back with a hand to touch the long braid that trailed down to almost touch his waist. He brought it forward. “I have no right to talk about the reasons for you to serve the Force while I still wear this.”

 _While so many still serve me_.

Even though he did not speak those words out loud, the boy seemed to have heard them anyway. His eyes widened even further and he sucked in a deep, shuddering breath that hollowed his cheeks. 

“Three days,” he declared, jerking his chin outward. “If I don’t see you here in three days, I’m leaving.”

“We don’t want you back,” the orphanage worker muttered just loudly enough to be heard. The boy whirled around to glare at him, but Baze had already shifted his gaze back to the master abbot.

“Only for three days,” she inclined her head in acquiescence. Her lips curved into a smile that was sardonic at the edges. “In repayment for the donations that your family has made to the Temple.”

 _The Force equalises all, and all within it know just what a lie that line is_.

Baze mirrored that smile. Then he bent his body down into a bow deeper than that which the acolyte had given him.

“The debts I owe are mine, and mine alone,” he said, voice quiet. “And I will pay them back to the best of my ability.”

Raising an eyebrow at him, the master abbot smiled. “There are no debts amongst those who decide to serve the Force.” She inclined her head. “It equalises all.”

The boy burst out laughing. Beside him, the police officers looked confused, and the orphanage worker was scowling. More, Baze guessed, because of the boy’s joy instead of any understanding of their exchange.

“I’ll see you in three days,” Baze said, and headed for the door.

He was almost at the main doors – Ah Qi having seen him and was waving to the carriers of his sedan chairs to prepare themselves – when he heard a shout: “Hey!”

Still grinning, the boy said, far too loud for the large, echoing entrance hall of the Temple, “ _Fung zi_! I don’t even know your name!”

Despite himself, Baze smiled. “Malbus,” he said, keeping his voice low. “The name you will call me by, later, you will find out in three days.”

The boy opened his mouth, and then closed it. He blinked, and then shook his head. “You don’t want to know my name?”

“In three days,” Baze said. He folded his arms into his sleeves, and tried to not grin too widely at the mulish look on the boy’s face. “Tell me the name you want to call me by, then. The Force equalises all, remember?” 

When the boy threw him a rude gesture – and hence gaining even more askance stares from the pilgrims and visitors who were streaming inside – Baze laughed. He turned around, and headed down the stairs.

“少爷,” Ah Qi greeted. He lifted up the curtain of the sedan chair, revealing the silk seats and cushions inside. “Are we going home, now?”

Perhaps he should get used to walking. But if he did so now, then it would be seen as something strange. Besides, Ah Qi would fret, and he didn’t want the old man to worry.

So Baze stepped inside and sat down. As it lifted, he looked down at himself. He closed his fingers around his changshan, right above the stain left by the boy’s hands.

This, he told himself, would be the last time.

***

Three days later, he stood in front of a mirror with a knife in his hand and a bag at his feet. 

He had not needed three days to pack. He had packed no clothes – all those he owned were too expensive, and they were not his anyway – and no books – there were plenty at the Temple.

There was nothing in that bag except for a thick sheaf of paper and some pots of ink, because the thought of the boy being taught to read and write – or to read and write _better_ – using the materials that most would say that his hands weren’t worthy enough to touch amused him, and that was a fancy that had caught him only this morning.

No, those three days had been spent writing letters to his family. He did not hope that they would understand; he only needed them to realise the seriousness of his intentions.

In the end, he left only one letter, addressed to his father. In it, he had written: “I have left home to become a monk. Do not worry.”

Now, the last step. Looking himself in the mirror, he lifted his braid. Then he placed the sharp edge of the knife against the nape of his neck, and sliced through the strands.

A knock on the door. Ah Qi was, as per usual, exactly on time.

“Come in,” Baze said. “And close the door behind you before looking at me.” The last order, he told himself, that he would ever give this man.

Still, it was necessary: it gave him the time to approach Ah Qi, close enough to press a hand over his mouth when the old man threatened to shriek at the sight of Baze without his braid.

“I’m leaving to join the Temple of the Whills,” he said, catching Ah Qi’s eyes and holding his gaze so it wouldn’t dart from Baze to the braid and back again. “And I want you to have this.”

He waited until Ah Qi’s trembling had stopped. Then he lowered his hand.

“Why?” It was a whisper, but it echoed so loudly in Baze’s suite of rooms that it might as well have been a shout. “What brought this on, 少爷?”

 _There is a deal that I made_ , Baze could say to make him understand. But that was not the point.

“This is what is right for me,” he said. He stepped back and took the braid with two hands. All of his movements had unravelled some of the strands at the top, so he gripped it tighter. “Just as it is right for me to give this to you, Li Zhen Qi.”

The sharp intake of breath that Ah Qi took rattled in Baze’s own chest. He couldn’t help but wonder how long it had been since that anyone had given Ah Qi the privilege of being called by his full name; how long it had been since he had been awarded that level of respect.

“You have served me faithfully since I was a child,” Baze continued. “For years, you have been stayed three steps behind me, and tended to my every need, without complaint. Even though there is surely nothing that makes me deserve such devotion, you have given it to me.”

He smiled. “This, in comparison, is a paltry gift.”

Ah Qi shook his head. His hands shook so much as he reached them out that Baze closed his own fingers around them. There were liver spots on the backs that he had never noticed before today. 

“I do not deserve this,” he said.

“You do,” Baze corrected. “But do not worry. I am not doing this because of you.”

When Ah Qi’s shoulders sagged in relief, Baze knew that he had said the right thing. He stepped back, picked up the bag of writing tools, and swung it over his shoulder. He headed for the door.

“Wait,” Ah Qi said. Baze stopped.

Withdrawing a piece of rough cloth from his pocket, Ah Qi handed it to him. “It’s better for you to wear this.” He hesitated.

“You can call me by my name,” Baze pointed out. “With my braid gone, I am no longer one of the aristocracy.”

“It would be too strange,” Ah Qi shook his head. Then he gave Baze a small, sheepish smile. “It is impossible for me to convince you to stay, isn’t it?”

The image of the boy on a rooftop, the sun on one side and NaJedha in the other. The stains he had left on Baze’s clothes: dust and dirt and soil. The places where the Force resided. The places that they were all going to return to, in the end. 

“No one can,” Baze said. “This is right for me.”

Then he continued down the hallway, then out to the entrance hall of his father’s mansion – the Malbus mansion – then out the door, then out of the gardens until the winds of Jedha whipped at his newly-shorn hair. 

There, he dropped his bag. He draped the cloth Ah Qi had given him over his head, and tied a knot at the back of his neck where his braid had used to start. 

He took a long, long look at the place he was leaving behind.

It was a massive place, more palace than mansion, with one central building and two wings on the other side. Three storeys tall all over, its walls gleamed like jade underneath the distorted sunlight that pierced through the glass which enclosed the whole place. The entire building was made of green bricks imported from planets of the Inner Rim. 

The gardens in front of the building had a massive pool with a fountain in the middle; water that ran and ran continuously for no reason but beauty and for the sake of the carved obsidian bridge that bisected it in the middle. The path to the house was lined with stones that had been polished to a shine by running water, in rivers that did not exist on this desert moon. 

Baze turned his back, and headed to the Temple. 

It took him an hour before he arrived. The same amount of time as a sedan chair would’ve taken. 

The boy was sitting at the doorway of the Temple. He was still wearing the grey robes of the orphanage, but they had obviously been washed. His tangled hair had been combed through and cut short: his bangs no longer fell in front of his eyes, but barely brushed the top of the high forehead that, Baze knew, would have many exclaiming about its nobility if he had been higher-born. There was a stick in his hand and he was prodding the plain pavement in front of him with it.

“You can’t write anything on that,” Baze said as a greeting. “Better to try to use sand.”

When the boy’s head jerked up and his eyes went wide again, Baze grinned. He slipped the bag off his shoulders, and tossed it to the boy. “There. Presents for you.”

“What?” the boy yelped. He fumbled with the thing, clearly having not expected just how heavy it was, before he set it down and opened it. He frowned, and lifted a piece of paper.

Baze caught his wrist before he could try biting into it. “You can’t eat it,” he said, a little belatedly.

“Obviously,” the boy huffed, as if he hadn’t just been caught trying to do exactly that. He squinted at Baze. “What is this for?”

“For you to practice writing on,” Baze told him. He cocked his head. “You know how to write, right?”

Chewing on his lip, the boy threw out, “A little bit,” like it was a challenge. 

“That’s good,” Baze said.

Silence stretched between them. Baze shoved his hands into his pockets. Something sharp jabbed him on his fingertips, and Baze jerked. “Oh, right,” he said, and pulled the thing out and held it out in front of the boy.

Eight kyber crystals – none smaller than the nail of Baze’s thumb, strung on a heavy cord made from the fibres of a uneti tree – shone underneath the late afternoon sunlight.

“Is that…” the boy’s hand hovered in front of it.

Baze nodded. “It’s a tradition.” He touched the top of his head, right over where Ah Qi’s cloth covered the shaved pate. “Every two years of a boy’s life would be marked by a crystal.”

“That’s…” The boy trailed off. He made a motion like he was counting on his fingers before he jerked, staring at Baze. “You’re _sixteen_?”

“Yes,” Baze said, and grinned.

“That’s only one year older than me!” 

Well, now he didn’t have to ask the boy for his age. Baze laughed, and nudged him with the necklace. “This was mine,” he said. “Now I’m giving it to you.”

Those eyes narrowed immediately, the dark shade clouded over by suspicion. “Why?”

 _Because it’s right_ , Baze thought. It was the truth: he had been going through his things, trying to decide what to bring, when he had spotted the necklace where it was shoved to the back of one of his desk drawers. When he had held it to the light, he had immediately thought of this boy. His darkly golden skin would suit the blue sheen of the crystals so much better than Baze’s own.

“It’s yours,” he repeated.

“No,” the boy said. He took a deep breath, and straightened his spine. “I don’t know why you want to give it to me, but it’s not fair for you to do that when you won’t even give me your name.”

“I’m not refusing to give you my name,” Baze pointed out, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. He would pursue the matter of the necklace again later, he decided. He didn’t want the boy to think that he was doing this out of some strange warped sense of charity.

“You just haven’t asked.”

The boy crossed his arms, scowling. “I’m _asking_ ,” he said, the words nearly as pointed as his gaze.

Laughing, Baze made a small bow, sweeping the hand holding the necklace out. “Baze,” he said. “Just Baze.”

“No,” the boy shook his head. “You’re Baze _Malbus_.” He stressed the last name. “Just like I’m Chirrut Îmwe.”

He hesitated, and then rubbed the back of his neck. “At least, they tell me that my name is Chirrut Îmwe anyway. I don’t know where it comes from.”

Any desire Baze had to deny that he belonged to the Malbus family died with the uncertainty that flickered so bright in those dark eyes. He sighed, shoving the kyber necklace back into his pocket before he kept his arms stiff at his side.

“You’re Chirrut Îmwe,” he said softly. “Like I’m Baze Malbus.”

Chirrut – a name like the chirping of a bird, and so unfitting to this boy who seemed so much more – made a bow back. Jerky, like he was unused to it.

He lifted his eyes with his back still bent. “Hi?”

“Hi,” Baze said, lips twitching. He resisted the urge to reach out, to touch, and instead said, “So… have you decided if you’re staying?”

Straightening, Chirrut sighed. “They feed me pretty well here,” he said, sounding rather belligerent about the matter. “And they told me that I can collect alms and give them to the kids at the orphanage if I join.”

So that was why he was stealing. Somehow, Baze wasn’t surprised. He smiled.

“I can do that with you, if you like,” he said. “We can learn together how to do that.”

Chirrut didn’t answer for a long moment, eyes resting on Baze. “Why are you doing this?” he asked. He dropped to a squat, fingers rubbing at the edges of the cloth bag with the writing materials. “Why are you doing all this for me?”

Baze looked down at his hands. This time, he told the truth: “I don’t know.” When Chirrut glared at him, he shrugged. “Maybe it’s because the Force wills it.”

“Do you believe in the Force that much?” Chirrut asked. “Do you really believe that it can do what… what people in there,” he waved towards the Temple, “say it can do?”

“I think that it exists,” Baze said slowly. “And… what’s the difference, really, between the Force making something happen, and people making something happen if they believe in the Force?”

“Huh?” Chirrut blinked.

“Maybe the Force equalises, maybe it doesn’t,” Baze said, voice soft. “If I believe that it does, and I work to make that happen… then it happens. Does it matter if I’m the one who makes it happen, or the Force?”

Chirrut cocked his head to the side. _Now_ he looked like a bird, especially with his eyes so wide.

“Did all of the paper that you’ve smelled turn your head funny?” he asked. 

Now it was Baze’s turn to be confused. “What?”

“Aha!” Chirrut jumped up, and jabbed a finger in his direction. “I’ve finally confused you like you did me!”

“What,” Baze repeated.

“Now we can go join the Temple together!” Chirrut continued. Then he did a very strange thing: he swung an arm over Baze’s shoulder, and picked up his bag with his other hand. “And we can collect alms together and give them to the orphanage kids together, too!”

Was confusion supposed to be the equaliser, now, instead of the Force? Baze didn’t understand.

But Chirrut’s body next to his felt right. Walking with him felt right, even though they were stumbling like a pair of drunkards.

“The Force is with me,” Baze tested on his tongue, “and I am one with the Force.”

To his surprise, Chirrut joined in., “I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me.” 

He stopped. Baze nearly fell over when Chirrut whirled towards him, staring. “I said it wrong, didn’t I?’

Baze opened his mouth, and then closed it. “No,” he said, slowly. “I think… I think you said it right. We said it right.”

Finally, he allowed himself to reach out, his hand brushing across the curve of Chirrut’s shoulder.

“We said it the way it should be said.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 少爷: Pronounced “shao ye” in Mandarin and “siu je” in Cantonese, it can be translated to “young master.” The term is usually used by servants to refer to the sons of their masters. It is also a term that is heavily loaded with connotations of wealth, aristocracy, and elitism. 
> 
> 国语: Pronounced “guo yü” in Mandarin, this is the term used to refer to Mandarin. Translated, it means “the country’s language.” It’s the language of governance. Nowadays, the term is 普通话, “pu tong hua,” which is the term promoted by the CCP while 国语 was used by the Kuomintang and those that came before it. 
> 
> Ah Qi: 阿七 _,_ translated as “seven.” His full name, 李贞七Li Zhen Qi, means “the seventh loyal one,” which means that he’s the seventh son of a family of indentured servants. Servants’ names tend to be reduced to one character and then appended with suffixes or prefixes by their masters/employers, much like servants in Western cultures tend to be called by nicknames instead of their proper names, e.g. ‘Jimmy’ instead of ‘James.’ Also, given that it’s _Ah Qi_ instead of _Qi Zi_ , it’s a hint that Baze’s family are Southern Chinese, not Northern. (Why is there such a long footnote for a minor character, IDEK.) 
> 
> Young Baze’s characterisation and backstory is partly inspired by Li Chongguang from _Bodyguards and Assassins_. The whole thing about giving up worldly cares for the Force is my attempt at returning the Force back to Buddhism. Which is where Lucas stole the whole concept from, plus Taoism. 
> 
> The kyber necklace is stolen indiscriminately from kaboomslang/skinks’s [_The Force Ghosts of Future Past_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10011695). Except now I have it belonging to Baze instead of Chirrut, and made up a new tradition for it.


	2. 不忠族, “unfaithful to the community”

The Rebel ships roar overhead, and he laughs.

_You know that laugh. You have felt the rumbles of it, from the base of his chest, on those nights when your bodies are pressed tight together. He laughs this way when you manage to find something clever enough to say to make him forget the small bed made for a single man, or the brick wall on their back and the stones beneath their feet, or even the whipping wind and the rustling sand that whirled all around them._

_A man should be jealous, you know. A man should hoard such laughter to himself, store it deep within himself, for such laughter is heart-woven out of the roaring embers of hope. Shivering impossibilities of flames made into threads plucked by careful fingers into sound._

_But you smile instead. You smile and you breathe easier._

_They are only ships. But within them, behind them, are people. Those who are not you; those made from something greater than dust, with feet planted in the soil of a world._

_A whole world that he can plant his feet upon. A world with roots that will clamour all over his toes and ankles, holding on tight._

_You hope. You_ hope _._

***

Earthenware made a duller sound than glass or porcelain when it met another like itself, but it was still loud enough to echo in this cavernous sitting room. Baze did not bother placing his finger beneath the bottom of the cup. Chirrut, he thought, would have no use for such manners.

The bitter tea lingered on his tongue. His mother, he knew, meant to send a message with the tea-set she had put out for this meeting; with the choice of common _pu-erh_ instead of _tie guan yin_ or even _gao shan cha_. But he had gotten used to such ordinariness in the two years he had spent in the Temple, and her intended insult fell instead into the realm of comforting familiarity.

“You must come home,” his mother said. Her eyes were narrowed on him. “It is long past time for you to take over the family.”

“I am a Guardian of Whills,” Baze said, voice mild. Technically, he did not have the right to claim that title: he had only recently achieved the second _duan_ , and only those who had achieved the third had fully graduated from being acolytes. “I have no family.”

A hand slammed on the table, making the pottery shake and tea slosh from cup onto the table. “That’s purely nonsense!” She jabbed a finger in his direction. “Blood is blood, son. You can never deny blood when it calls.”

Her nails, Baze noticed, were chipped at the tips, and the long one she had always kept on her right little finger had been cut to blunt flatness. 

“The Force equalises everyone,” he told her, reaching to the edge of the table to pick up the rag left there, incongruous against the general opulence of the sitting room. “Those who have given themselves up to serve it are all brothers and sisters within its embrace.”

An image came to him, unbidden: Chirrut in the Temple’s courtyard, a practice staff flashing in his hand as he twirled it around. His laughter as he jabbed randomly, the yelps of the acolytes, and the harsh voices of the Masters as they berated him for not taking the forms seriously.

Jedha’s cold sunlight skittering on his skin, more gold than brown now that he had to spend time indoors. The sheen of sweat that turned the colour shimmering. Liquid grace that wrapped its fingers around Baze’s throat, and squeezed. 

He focused back on the cloth, and wiped up the spill. 

“Blood has no place within the Force.” He looked up, and smiled at her like Chirrut would: with bared teeth, showing off his gums. “To have called you ‘mother’ as I did when I first entered was already a mistake I made.”

Eyes widening, her fingers slowly lowered.

Perhaps Baze was being cruel to her. Perhaps Baze should listen to the voice telling him his mother did not receive him with inexpensive objects as an insult, but because she could not afford anything grander now that his father was ill. Perhaps he should pluck out the words that were hovering in the air between them; those that told him that he was her last resort, and he did have a duty towards those who had raised him for sixteen years.

But his parents had not raised him.

“Is Ah Qi still here?” he asked, looking around.

“Of course not,” his mother snorted. “We sent him packing long ago. What use do we have of him when you are gone?”

Ah Qi had served the family for decades, and his family had been servants of the Malbus clan for centuries. Baze picked up his cup to sip from it, forcing down the hot, bitter liquid so he could grip the earthenware with his fingertips.

“Where has he gone?”

“Probably back to his hometown,” his mother shrugged. Ah Qi, Baze knew, had been born and bred in the Malbus estate, in the quarters at the back of the gardens – unobtrusive, easily hidden – where all of the servants resided. 

His mother’s eyes narrowed. “If having him serve you again is your condition for returning, then I’ll have some of the others look for him,” she offered, spreading out a hand. She had never turned this particular smile – wide with lips thinned – to him before, but Baze knew what it meant, nonetheless.

“There is no need,” Baze said. “Because I will not return, and there is nothing that you can do that will make me even want to.”

“What’s so good about that Temple?” She had finally lost her patience with him, standing up to glare down at him. “Was it that Temple that fed you, clothed you, and sheltered you for sixteen years? Is it to the Force that you owe your very _existence_?”

Her hands slapped on the table again. This time, Baze was quick enough to lift the tea out of the way so it wouldn’t spill over again.

“No,” his mother hissed, leaning close now. “You owe all that to us.”

Baze put the tea back down.

_“I don’t get it,” Chirrut hissed in his ear._

_It was only a few weeks since they had arrived at the Temple and had been made into acolytes. Chirrut was still on his extended probationary period – his manners were too rough for the quiet of the temple – which was why he really shouldn’t be caught crawling into Baze’s bedroll in the middle of the night._

_Shifting, Baze looked at him. The bare light coming through the window slats above lit up Chirrut’s eyes, turning the colour bright-dark and glittering like the stars they had just studied today. The constellations found in those glossy books dulled in comparison._

_Reaching out, he placed a hand on Chirrut’s mouth and shook his head. He waited until Chirrut nodded before he sat up. Chirrut pressed himself next to him, his whippet-thin body – he hadn’t filled out yet even after eating at least the share of two boys at every meal – bony and sharp against Baze’s ribs._

_They headed out of the acolytes’ shared sleeping quarters, and up the stairs. There was a ladder there, in a corner of the highest level, that led to a grate that was closed with a rusty padlock that could be wriggled open if one was careful and nimble enough._

_Baze kept watch at the bottom of the ladder, as always, while Chirrut fiddled. He climbed up when he heard the tell-tale_ click _, taking the padlock from Chirrut’s hand and putting it into the pocket of his dark blue acolyte robes. They nudged the grate open carefully together, and shifted away the loose tiles of the roof before they climbed upwards._

_Only when they had both settled against some of the steadier tiles, Chirrut’s foot bumping against his ankle, did Baze ask, “What is it that you don’t get?”_

_“That there are so few of us who are like me,” Chirrut said. He stretched out his legs and leaned back on his hands, staring up to the smoky, starless Jedha night sky. “I didn’t hear about a lot of street rats becoming Guardians, but I thought that was because those who did were ashamed of their roots, and so they hid their pasts. I didn’t…”_

_Trailing off into silence, he shrugged._

_“You heard what the master abbot had said,” Baze reminded gently. “Desperation makes for poor devotion to the Force.”_

_He didn’t tell Chirrut that he wasn’t a rat, and had never been. He had said that too many times, and Chirrut had never really believed him._

_“That’s not what doesn’t make sense,” Chirrut said. He rubbed his nose hard, reddening the tip of it. “It’s that… there aren’t a lot of people like me here, but there are still… there are still so many…”_

_Turning, his eyes caught the scant moonbeams as he asked, “Why would so many people do this? Why would all of them give up their families for… for something like the Force that they can’t touch?”_

__Oh _. Baze breathed out._

_Slowly, cautiously, he raised his arm until it was hovering above Chirrut’s shoulders. He waited until Chirrut nodded before he lowered it, his hand folding in around the skinny, bony curve. Chirrut’s breath was very warm against his neck._

_“What comes into your head when you think about family?” he asked gently._

_“Um,” Chirrut said. He wriggled around until he was more firmly pressed against Baze’s side, one hand on top of the cradle of his own thighs and the other resting on Baze’s knee. “There was once,” Chirrut started again after a long pause. “There was this little kid. He was standing in front of the millers’ square, and he was crying really loud. Making a whole nuisance of himself. He was separated from his parents, I think, and…”_

_He swallowed, and rubbed at his eyes with a fist. Baze waited._

_“When someone managed to find them, his father was panicking, his mother was crying, and both of them just… just went up there and picked him up and held him so tight that I swear he couldn’t breathe. They just kept holding him even after he stopped crying.”_

_A sudden, inexplicable urge came onto Baze: he wanted to kiss Chirrut’s hair. Maybe his temple. He wanted to hold him close like he was describing the child being held._

_But he couldn’t. Both of them knew the Temple’s rules._

_So instead, he said, “I have never been to the market with my parents.”_

_Chirrut blinked. He tipped his head up, peering at Baze. “Never?”_

_“Never,” Baze confirmed. “I have never been to the market myself, actually. Not properly.” They were facing the market now, so he pointed precisely to that spot. “My servant – Ah Qi, I’ve told you about him – he’d let me from the sedan chair there,” he pointed to a squat, grey, three-storey building around three minutes on foot away, “and that’s the only part I was allowed to walk before I come in here.”_

_His lips twitched up into a smile he didn’t feel. “That’s the only part of the market I know.”_

_“Here,” Chirrut said. He had hold of Baze’s wrist, tugging him forward. “You see that shop over there, with the blue awning?”_

_It was difficult to see colour in the middle of the night, but Baze didn’t want to disappoint, so he tried. To his surprise, he_ could _see it: light blue, like that of the fifth_ duan _Guardians’ sash. “Yeah, I see it.”_

_“To the left of it is the millers’ square,” Chirrut chirped at him, grinning with his gums showing. “It’s easier to find when you’re actually down there: you just need to follow your nose to the smell of mantou and baozi being steamed.”_

_“Why is it called millers’ square if they sell food?” Baze asked, mystified._

_Chirrut barked a laugh, overly loud, and rubbed Baze’s fuzzed forehead. “Because you see the millers there every morning, selling the flour,” he said. Then he widened his eyes and leaned in closer. “You do know that mantou and baozi are made with flour, right? You know what flour is, right?”_

_Well, there was no good response to that except to tackle Chirrut down onto the tiles. The red bricks clacked and clanked against each other as they rolled around._

_“Shhh!” Chirrut hissed at him. He was lying beneath Baze, still grinning, and he reached up and tugged on one of Baze’s ears. “You’re going to wake everyone up.”_

_“I know what flour is,” Baze said, feeling weirdly petulant. He poked Chirrut’s cheek, right where it was starting to fill up. When Chirrut turned his head to try to bite it, he laughed, dropping his head down._

_“Sometimes having family isn’t a good thing,” he told Chirrut’s bony collarbone. “And… and for those for whom having family is a good thing, they don’t have to give that up. Not entirely.”_

_Chirrut’s fingertips skittered over his jaw. Baze’s breath hitched with his desire to kiss them. To kiss Chirrut’s full, plush lips, unchanged even after all these weeks._

_He closed his eyes and leaned their foreheads together instead. Chirrut breathed steadily against him, and his heart beat steady and slow against Baze’s ribs._

__“You’re right,” Baze said. “I don’t owe the Temple any of that.”

Standing up, he folded his hands over the edge of the table at the sight of his mother’s triumphant smile. 

“But I don’t owe you, or this family, any of that either.” He gave her a bow, as deep as warranted for a guest to give to his host, too shallow for a son to his mother, before he turned and headed for the door.

“Baze, wait!”

He stopped, but did not turn. “Please do not contact me again.”

When he walked through the estate’s gates this time, he did not turn his gaze back to it. He did not need to.

That was not where his heart lived. That was not where he could find his reason to exist. 

***

The quarters they shared with two other second _duan_ acolytes were empty when they returned to them. Baze barely had the time to pull close the curtains – the windows looked out to some of their juniors practicing on the grounds outside – before Chirrut was shimmying out of his robes.

“You’re starting to make a name for yourself, you know,” he said, voice slightly muffled by the layers of cloth that were now obscuring his face. 

“Really,” Baze said. His fingers let go of the edge of the curtain, and he crossed his arms as he raised an eyebrow over his shoulder. “I thought that was you.”

“Peh,” Chirrut snorted. Brandishing the outer layer of his robe, he grinned at Baze. “Baze Malbus, the most devoted. Baze Malbus, the most talented. Baze Malbus, he’s going to excel in everything that the masters throw at him, and exceed all of their expectations too.”

He approached Baze while flapping his robes from side to side, like some makeshift cloth staff. The filthy water collected at the sleeves and knees – from where they had been scrubbing the floors of the Temple’s first level – flicked at Baze. Baze ducked underneath one particularly high-handed flail, coming up behind Chirrut and wrapping his arms around his waist.

“What about you?” he asked, pressing his nose into Chirrut’s hair, taking liberties that he hadn’t dared to take only two years ago, only a few weeks ago. “Chirrut Îmwe, the most Force-attuned. Chirrut Îmwe, the most brilliant. Chirrut Îmwe, who learns all of the forms and makes them work even better without looking like he’s making the effort.”

Chirrut laughed, trying to get out of Baze’s grip. His lips brushed against Baze’s jaw. He froze. Slowly, Baze turned his head. 

Their mouths slid together. The robes fell to the ground as Chirrut clutched at him, fingers clenching around the light blue under-collar of Baze’s robes – the mark of his rank – before he leaned even further against him. Chirrut had filled out since he began receiving regular meals, but he would always be wiry, and Baze’s final growth spurt had had him broadening so much that it was easy now to spread his legs so Chirrut could fit his entire body against his.

He could feel the heat of Chirrut’s cock pressing against his thigh. Baze squeezed his eyes even tighter shut, splaying out his fingers so he could feel the lines of Chirrut’s back. The tips dragged hard over the knobs of Chirrut’s spine, and Chirrut made a sound that surely had to be made unlawful – a low, gasping whine – before he sank a hand into Baze’s long hair.

A sudden _crack_ from the outside. A door slammed shut.

They jerked their heads apart so quickly that a trail of saliva stretched between them. Chirrut licked his lips as they stared at each other. 

“So,” Baze said. “The most devoted, you said?”

“Yes,” Chirrut nodded, completely solemn. “The absolute, ultimate most.”

Baze shoved him by the shoulders. Chirrut was laughing even as he stumbled backwards and caught his heel on the edge of Baze’s bedroll. Even tangled together like this, he was still graceful, falling slowly and dragging Baze with him until they fell together in a heap of lips and huffing giggles.

“So devoted that he has the authority to decide which rules are good to follow, and which are bullshit,” Chirrut continued, only slightly out of breath.

Snorting, Baze shook his head. He shoved a heavy strand of hair out of his eyes before he leaned over Chirrut, pressing a finger on the tip of his nose just to see his brow furrow. “I think that you’ve mistaken me for yourself,” he said, tone conversational. “And that word… I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

Chirrut stared at him. After a moment, Baze’s lips twitched, and he raised an eyebrow.

It was almost too much to take when Chirrut surged up with a cry, bucking him off and pinning him down on his own bedroll. Baze laughed, wriggling with half of his body on the floor as Chirrut attacked him with his fingers, his own hands scrabbling at Chirrut’s dark grey-green sash, trying to stop him.

Eventually, he caught hold of the shoulders, and hauled Chirrut up. Chirrut blinked at him, head tilted to the side like a bird again, and Baze’s heart was filling up so much, so fast, that he had to cup Chirrut’s face and kiss him again. He had to lick into that warm mouth, tasting the cheap, sugared chrysanthemum smuggled in from the market as Chirrut’s tongue snuck into his own.

In the Temple, the Force equalised all, and connected all: they were brothers and sisters under one roof. As each was part of the family that the Force connected and the roof overhead created, there were strict laws that forbade any relationship between two Guardians.

It was a sensible rule, Baze knew; it kept the Temple free of twisting politics and snarled emotions that would come from broken hearts and ripped trust; from theatrics that would come out 

None of that seemed to matter when the fit of Chirrut’s body against his own was perfect. When the taste of his mouth soothed something deep within Baze that he hadn’t even realised had been hurting. When all this – the Temple, the empty room, the oblivious junior acolytes beyond the curtains who were so loud that they surely could hear none but themselves – seemed to be the Force’s will allowing them to bind them together. 

“You’re thinking really loudly,” Chirrut said. 

He had set his elbows on either side of Baze’s head, looming over him while smiling lopsidedly. Baze reached up to cup his face, tracing the line of those plush lips. His shoulders shook when Chirrut closed his teeth around the very tip of his finger and stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Baze said. He swung his leg over Chirrut’s waist when Chirrut tried to pull away. “Not that I want to stop.”

“Then why?” There it was again, the flash of insecurity that hid beneath Chirrut’s flashing grin and quick-draw confidence. Baze rubbed the curve of his cheek with his thumb.

Baze shrugged. After a moment, Chirrut blinked at him before he burst out into loud cackles, like the cawing of crows, before he buried his face into Baze’s shoulder to try to muffle them.

Cradling the back of his head, Baze smiled. Anyone who tried to argue that Chirrut was stupid – because he didn’t speak the proper ways in some circumstances, or because he couldn’t understand the archaic forms of the language that some books were written in, or because he didn’t understand some of the references people around them made – were the fools themselves.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Chirrut gasped out finally, head tipped up with eyes, crinkled at the sides, on Baze. “I’ll get in trouble for having corrupted you.”

He pretended to give that thought some consideration before he shook his head, hands cupping Chirrut’s face. “But if you do it, you’ll still get into trouble,” he said. “Because they would think that you’re just being rebellious instead of making a good point about the rules.” He paused.

“Again.”

“Maybe I should tell them that you corrupted me instead,” Chirrut said. But his smile faded, and the hand that traced over Baze’s jaw was barely, just barely, tremulous. “What if they refuse to listen to even you?”

Baze smiled, crooked at the edges. “If I tell you to leave here, with me, will you?”

Chirrut looked at him for a long, long while. Then he sighed, resting his cheek on Baze’s chest, his fingers tangling into his robes.

“I like it here,” he said, voice tremulous and soft. 

Brushing his fingertips over Chirrut’s hair – so soft now, even cut close to the skull – Baze nodded. “Then we will find another way.”

He wrapped his arms around Chirrut’s shoulders, sinking back into thought. His gaze drifted before settling back onto the curtains. He wanted, all of a sudden, to rip them open; to let everyone see what he and Chirrut had so they would never doubt how right it was. So they would understand that they were wrong.

Maybe they would. He wasn’t sure.

But he knew that if Chirrut would not leave, and if they would not change their mind, he would still not let Chirrut go. 

He would burn this Temple down to the ground before he would. 

***

Master Abbot Akshara’s rooms always smelled of ginger and sweetened bantha milk, a scent that lingered on her clothes. The source of it was the pot that was always on the side of the desk, sitting on top of a stand with a candle underneath to keep the tea warm, and the small jar that sat beside it.

Baze lifted the pot and poured carefully into the mugs Akshara had already set out. Then he placed it back on its stand before he took the jar. Three splashes for the master abbot’s sweet tooth, and a single one for his own.

They didn’t speak for long moments after Baze had settled back into his seat. Akshara looked at him, the mug held close to her lips and her gaze piercing and steady. Baze took care to not meet her gaze, instead fixing his eyes upon the single strand of jasmine flowers braided into her thick hair.

The sound of the ticking clock filled the silence.

Akshara set her mug down onto the wooden desk. It gave a _thud_ ; heavy punctuation for her words, “That was a daring scene the two of you made.”

It had been Chirrut who suggested it; Chirrut who had pulled Baze in by his robes right after prayers, in front of everyone, and kissed him. But it was Baze who had retrieved the kyber necklace from his pocket – the last remnant of his past now that the paper and ink had long been used for Chirrut’s learning – and placed it upon Chirrut’s neck; Baze who had insisted on facing Akshara alone.

Chirrut knew the battles and tactics of the streets. But Baze had been brought up on the knees of strategists, and fed on theorems on the art of war.

He said, “Only as daring as the situation required.”

“There are plenty who are calling for the two of you to be thrown out,” Akshara continued as if she hadn’t heard him. But there was a furrow deep between her brows, so Baze knew that his first strike had hit true. “Plenty more who have demanded that you are exiled from the city entirely.”

“The Temple does not have the right to exile anyone,” Baze said, keeping his voice mild.

“Right now, the government will do whatever it is that we tell them,” Akshara said, and her smile had a sharp edge that showed teeth. “They dearly wish for our public support against the growing dissent outside of our doors.”

Earthenware instead of glass or porcelain, and cheap tea. Shadows that flitted around the market, visible even from the Temple’s rooftop during his and Chirrut’s late-night trips. Baze wrapped his hands around the mug and smiled blandly. He did not speak.

After a long moment, Akshara sighed. She turned around and pulled out one of her desk drawers. From it she drew out a long pipe, and a box.

Baze watched as she filled the pipe with tobacco and lit it. 

“Two years ago, you swore that you will give your life to serve the Force,” Akshara said, her words now framed by the white smoke curling from her lips to shiver and fade into the threads of kyber embedded in the ceiling. “Do you still hold by that vow?”

“I think many have mistaken service to the Force,” he said, deliberately slow, “with obedience to the Temple and its rules.” 

The barest twitch on the corner of her mouth.

“Have they?” 

Unfolding his arm, Baze gestured towards her hair, the pot of tea, and the tobacco pipe. “Giving up worldly cares,” he said, “includes the comforts and addictions brought from home.” He cocked his head to the side. “Or even those picked up within the confines of these walls.”

She had given him an opening: it would have been rude for him to not take it. In fact, Baze was starting to suspect that she _wanted_ him to, and he had played straight into her hands.

He would have begrudged that more if it wasn’t so clearly for his benefit.

Her widening smile only strengthened that impression. “Is that what you would call that display?” she asked. “A comfort, or an addiction?”

Placing his elbows on the desk, Baze folded his hands in front of him. “It is what it is,” he said, repeating the words given by masters in answer to frustrated acolytes when they asked what the Force was.

Akshara stilled for such a long moment that Baze felt the nervousness he had been keeping at bay creep back up his spine. He breathed through his teeth and reminded himself of Chirrut’s wild grin right after he had pulled away from Baze.

“So that’s how it is,” she said finally. She up-ended the pipe and tapped it against the side of her ashtray before she placed it down, balancing the long thin stem against a notch. “That’s a clever way to phrase things.”

Baze inclined his head. “The phrasing is mine,” he said, and cocked his head to the side. “But the insights are Chirrut’s.”

 _This_ , his eyes confirmed, _is what we’re capable of. Together._

“I see,” Akshara said. “The two of you are asking, then, for the dissent outside our doors to come in.”

“We’re asking for change,” Baze spread his hands out. “Whether we will find it within the Temple, or we will have to venture out into the city or even further for it… That is up to you, Master Abbot.”

“You would leave of your own accord because of this?” Akshara raised an eyebrow. “Both of you?”

Chirrut did not want to leave. Chirrut had told him, haltingly, that this was where he understood the idea of home. This _was_ his home.

“Both of us,” Baze said. 

Akshara looked at him for a long moment. Baze did not avert his gaze, though he did send a mental apology to Chirrut for lying on his behalf.

“There will need to be a trial,” she said after long moments of silence.

“For us?” Baze tilted his head to the side, and smiled. “Or for the rules?”

She held out both hands, palms up. “You have set yourselves against them, Acolyte Baze, so are they not the same?” Palms slapping together, she smirked at him over the tips of her fingers, eyes flashing a challenge that wrapped around Baze’s throat. A solid, strangling weight.

“May the Force of others be with you.”

The Force equalised all. The Force took no sides. Baze knew all that.

Bowing his head, he mirrored the gesture just as loudly. “And with you,” he murmured in return. 

But Baze had learned from Ah Qi long ago: service must be repaid. If not, then those who served had no recourse but to be helpless fools.

And Chirrut was no fool.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Pu-erh, tie guan yin_ , _gao shan cha:_ 普洱, 铁观音, 高山茶 are types of Chinese tea. _Pu-erh_ is served at middle-grade Chinese restaurants everywhere; _gao shan cha_ is rarer and usually found in high-grade restaurants and originates from Taiwan; and _tie guan yin_ is usually reserved for guests, the higher the grade the more honoured the guest. The fact that Baze doesn’t even think of jasmine or chrysanthemum, the really common teas, is just another sign of his ridiculously wealthy upbringing.
> 
> Mantou and baozi: 馒头mantou are those square, fluffy things without filling, usually used to soak up gravy and is an essential part of northern Chinese cuisine; 包子baozi are filled with both sweet and savoury stuffs like roasted pork, chicken, lotus seed paste, etc., and is usually eaten on its own and is quintessentially southern Chinese. Both are delicious.
> 
> Akshara is a Hindu name, and ginger tea with sweetened milk is an actual thing. I’m not actually sure what its real name is in Hindi – or if it’s actually available in India for the matter – but the name I know it by is _teh halia_. It is also awesome.
> 
> Am I making Jedha a version of my own ridiculously multicultural city that’s somehow run by very traditionally Chinese principles and precepts? Yes, yes I am.
> 
> (Can you catch the rising sense of creepiness? Yes? It gets worse from here.)


	3. 不忠界, “unfaithful to the world”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings:** This chapter is when things turn _really_ dark; it’s time for the fall of the Temple. Aside from the lack of the tattoos, this is the biggest change from _a bridge of birds_. More importantly, there is one sex scene here that’s extremely murky in terms of consent issues (think “explicit consent for terrible reasons you shouldn’t consent to sex for.”) There is also ableism and internalised ableism in that scene. 
> 
> Please skip now to the end notes if you want a summary of the scene before proceeding.

“Chirrut! Come back!

_You have always wanted to give him something to believe in. Something greater than a fallible man with thin shoulders and grasping hands searching for righteousness in a world that has so little to spare._

“Come!”

 _There are others now. On that planet with the heavy air that smelled green, you have heard them and felt them. You have_ seen _them, kyber-bright pulses in the Force; some flickering like candles exposed to desert winds, others shining like the stars you never had the chance to properly see._

_And those four who came with you, those whose names you hold under your tongue to caress like a rare sweet berry, they shine the brightest of all. With such brilliance, they can surely… surely…_

“Come with me!” 

_It is not that you’re tired of his weight. You will never be: you love him so much that those years you breathed without him by your side had nearly dragged you down until you’re falling, sinking, like those rare Jedhan raindrops that seeped deep into loose sand. You have borne his weight through the worst; through that very first time your world had burnt down, all those decades ago when destruction had merely been metaphorical and there was still familiar ground beneath your feet even as the sand shifted and the winds whirled and whirled._

_This is the truth: he deserves to have more than you to hold on to. He deserves a world he can look upon at sunrise and see, if only briefly, the rippling threads of the Force from its awakening. He deserves those breathless moments of beauty._

_You will give them to him. You will try._

_What else would you strive for? You have held on to the Force so tightly and for so long for his sake, after all._

***

They won a victory against the rules. The Temple remained standing tall, though its insides changed, rooms and people shifting like the dry leaves caught within a cold storm. With their eyes on Baze and Chirrut, more brothers and sisters turned towards each other. Baze remembered Akshara’s gasping laughter when she had to make new rules that would suit the children of such couplings and their parents. 

Nearly two decades, nineteen years, passed in whirls of colour, greens and yellows and blues, until they settled with the scarlet of the eighth _duan_ , the highest. Chirrut hit his final growth spurt, but sweetness lingered in the bird-like delicacy of his wrists, in the tofu-like silk of his face and the backs of his hands. 

He had never worn the kyber necklace Baze had given him. But when he decided on a staff as a weapon, he set the crystals, all eight of them, upon the tip of the flame-hardened uneti wood. An expensive relic of a useless tradition turned to a weapon. When Baze had first seen it, he had laughed with a joy that wreaked through his bones. 

Outside the Temple walls, the city changed in those nineteen years. Braids fell to the sand and were replaced by rich, thick curls, both twined with jasmine and not. Ships appeared in the skyline of the city, bringing more than pilgrims. Bringing monsters wearing the faces of traders, of saviours. Baze learned, grudgingly, to hate the colour of white.

When the Temple fell, Akshara had died first. She had stood at the door of the Temple, her lightbow in one hand and her gleaming _talwar_ in the other, shooting down stormtroopers as they approached and taking down all those who dared climb the first step to the Temple. Later, much later, Baze heard that she had been a vision: her dark hair, streaked with grey but still braided with jasmine, whirling as she deflected blaster bolts with the curved blade, the kyber crystal embedded in the hilt pulsing with every blow; and her lightbow had taken down hundreds.

She died when a stormtrooper took a splinter of the Temple’s doors and driven it into her heart. The sister who had told him the story had said, Akshara could not bear to defend herself against the Temple that had been her only home. She had said, Akshara’s death was one that was fit for legend, and she would never be forgotten. 

Baze had smiled, then, and had not the heart to tell her that the time for legends was already gone. 

It had not faded away like the slow collapse of a massive star. It had flickered out of existence in the few seconds needed for a man’s knees to hit the ground; in those seconds when he gathered the breath to scream.

The Temple’s walls had fallen, leaving nothing but rubble and debris. But when Baze walked amongst it, mere days after the Empire’s ravaging, he could still hear the echoes of Chirrut’s pain echoing and echoing.

“I can’t see you now, but I can still hear you thinking.”

Chirrut was standing on the spot that had used to be the doorway to their rooms. His now-blue eyes, the dark-brightness having been drained out of it by endless days and nights of pain that reverberated through the Force and twisted his bones, shifted from Baze’s face to his shoulder then over his head.

“At least say something so I know you’re there.”

How could Chirrut still have that soft, teasing cheer in his voice? Baze swallowed, and closed his eyes so he would not look at the blindness he had not been able to protect Chirrut from.

“It’s all gone,” he said. “Everything.”

He had been insulated from it, as much as one could be shut off from war when it beat outside the door. He had been in their rooms, the rooms that they had fought so hard to share with each other, and holding onto Chirrut.

As the Temple crumbled, centuries to history erased in minutes by the uncaring, the sounds were punctuated by Chirrut’s sobs and screams. Baze knew which mattered more to him.

Soft footsteps, and a quiet tapping. Chirrut used his staff to guide him, now, slowly getting used to the new darkness that covered him so entirely. Baze stepped forward, reaching out a hand that trembled where it hovered until Chirrut’s fingertips touched it. Then he pulled Chirrut close, one arm wrapping around his shoulders.

“We can rebuild,” Chirrut said. One arm wrenched free from where it was trapped between their bodies, reaching up to brush over Baze’s eyes and cheeks. He lifted his head until his strange-new eyes were meeting Baze’s. “There is much we still remember, and the city stands. We can rebuild.”

“ _How_?” The word seemed to burst out of Baze’s chest.

The Master Guardians were all dead, and their brothers and sisters were mostly gone now, too; Baze’s hands still stank of sand and fire and ash from burning their bodies. All those who survived had gone into hiding, scattered into the winds. Even the sister who had told him that the Guardians of Whills would survive into legend had disappeared.

Chirrut smiled. There was a gentleness to him now when there had been fire to him before, as if all of the suffering he had witnessed and felt had dimmed the flames until he had barely enough to sustain himself.

His hand splayed over Baze’s cheek, and he said, “Nothing material lasts forever, my brother.”

The title was familiar, and so was the tease. Baze knew what Chirrut meant for it to do. He knew he should at least try to allow it to have effect.

But all he could think of was, _You’re material, too_.

“We survived,” Chirrut continued. His hand shifted up, sinking lightly into Baze’s now-tangled and unwashed hair that had spilled free from its usual neat ponytail. “We remember. The Temple has not died. And the Force—”

“The Force made you _blind_ ,” Baze snarled, and was surprised at the venom in his own voice. His hand shook as he traced the lines beside Chirrut’s eyes; lines of pain that hadn’t been there merely a week ago. “The Force did nothing while evil wrecked the only home you have ever known!”

It had done nothing while revolution had swept Jedha, all those years ago. It had done nothing while the Temple had fallen into disrepairs as the city grew poorer and poorer under the guidance of leaders who had not known how to rule. Then, Baze had not cared.

But the Force had done nothing to stop _this_. The Force had taken away Chirrut’s sight. That Baze could not bear.

“Baze,” Chirrut started, but Baze knew what he would say. He had already heard it before, they had already fought over this: Chirrut believed that the Force had done him a favour, and that he had asked to be blind. He didn’t want to listen to it over again; his heart could not take it again.

So he kissed Chirrut instead. Kissed him hard and crushed his still-slimmer, still-shorter body to his own broad chest. The Force had been unfair, too, for holding Chirrut’s years of malnourishment against him. 

_You are material, too,_ the thought came again. _You will not last forever, but I want you to_.

He cupped the back of Chirrut’s head to weld their mouths tighter together. Chirrut made a sound, practically a squeak, and his staff went clattering to the ground as he clutched as Baze’s shoulders, fingers clenching over the arms of his now-greyed black robes.

Perhaps Baze should be the one who could walk away from this. Perhaps he should be the one to comfort Chirrut instead, to hold him tight in his new darkness while the world had been taken away from him in such a cruel way. 

But Baze had always walked away with his sights set upon something else. He had only thrown away what did not matter when he found something, some _one_ , who held his hands better. 

With the Temple gone, there was nothing left. Nothing but Chirrut, who had always been the reason why he stayed; the reason why he breathed.

“Please,” he whispered, pressing his nose and mouth against Chirrut’s neck just to feel his pulse beating. “Please.”

He did not know what it was that he was pleading for. Only that he was left adrift, and he _needed_.

“One last time,” Chirrut said. Baze jerked his head up, but before his breath could hitch, Chirrut was smiling again, and his hand was on Baze’s cheek. “In that room, I mean.”

“Oh,” Baze said. He took a deep breath and tried to straighten, but Chirrut leaned heavier against him, his hand shifting to tangle with Baze’s and move them both down to his waist.

“You’ll have to lead me,” he said.

The words were like cold water splashed on Baze’s face. His trembling ceased before starting again, and he took a deep breath. “Okay,” he nodded, turning his head so he could bury a kiss into Chirrut’s hair. “Okay.”

They walked to Chirrut’s rooms. The staff Baze left behind: he could not stand the see the kyber crystals embedded in the tip, not when they were surrounded by the ruins of the Temple that had used to safeguard and practically worship them. Not when he could see, out of the corner of his eyes, the threads of kyber that wound through the ceiling, still glittering underneath the dim sunlight that came through the broken walls. 

Their rooms had been as brutalized as the rest of the Temple. 

The desk that they had used to sit together, the desk where Baze had made Chirrut’s first brush, was punctured with so many blaster holes that some of the drawers had fallen and overturned onto the ground. The chest of drawers with their clothes – nothing more than a few pieces of cloth stretched over a metal frame – had completely collapsed. The teas and snacks they had kept surreptitiously in the last drawer had spilled out, but the smell of the leaves was drowned out by the lingering scent of burning wood and charred metal. The bookshelves with all of their books, some in Basic and the other in the written language they shared, had keeled to a side; some of Chirrut’s favourite novels had their pages torn out, fluttering to the ground, and Baze’s hand-copied version of the three hundred classical poems was nothing more than ash surrounded by paper uselessly holding on. The folder with Chirrut’s writing practices carefully bound was lying on its side, half-covered by ash.

Marks of two lives spent together for almost two decades, gone in mere minutes.

Baze closed his eyes, and turned away. He tucked Chirrut’s hand into his elbow, held on tighter to him, and led him to their old bedroom. 

For some reason that Baze did not want to imagine, their bedroom had been left intact. It was a tiny place with nothing but a slightly lifted platform that was overlaid with two thick bedrolls that were pressed together side by side. Once, they had made plans about asking for a single bedroll, mostly so Baze would not feel the hard wood of the platform digging into his ribs and spine when he sprawled in the middle of the bed with Chirrut on top of him, but the matter had just been pushed back until Baze was sure he couldn’t sleep without that discomfort.

“Nothing here has changed,” Baze said. He didn’t let Chirrut go.

Chirrut reached out a hand to brush along the walls. “Except for everything?” he asked. That inexplicable teasing tone was back in his voice.

Baze nodded before he remembered that Chirrut couldn’t see it; not anymore. “Except,” his voice croaked, and he cleared his throat, “except for everything.”

Their bedroom remaining untouched seemed more of an insult than a mercy. 

“Come,” Chirrut said, somehow still being able to telling unerringly when Baze was caught up too much in his thoughts. His elbow tugged on Baze’s arm, and Baze obeyed the cue to lead them towards their bed.

He tried to lay Chirrut down on it like he always did. But Chirrut’s heel caught on the edge, and he fell backwards too suddenly, too quickly, and Baze’s breath hitched as he tried to catch him. They clattered onto the bedrolls together, bones jarring against wood, and Baze felt his eyes burning again for reasons he didn’t want to think about because they were all around him. All around _them_. 

Lifting himself back up, he caught sight of Chirrut’s eyes again. And jerked his head away.

His gaze landed on a lacquered box, round in shape with its diameter no bigger than the span of his hand. Black, it was printed with tiny ginger flowers still on the vines: some still in bud, some in full bloom, all deepening from pale orange at the centre to stark red; all with white lining the edges of the petals.

When they had first won the trial so many years ago, Akshara had gifted this to them. “For your bedside,” she had whispered out of the corner of her grinning mouth.

Her people did not sleep the same way Baze and Chirrut were used to: they slept on boards set on four legs and made of crisscrossing bamboo and stiffened hemp, with plenty of space for drawers or boxes to the side. But she still had had the box made for them, and Baze suspected her direct hand in the exquisite design. Ginger blooms for ginger tea and jasmine flowers; a reminder of the hints she gave.

It was untouched. The flowers still caught the dimming light of the day.

Baze picked up the box and shifted his body back. Sitting beside Chirrut, he picked up one of his hands, and rested it on top of the box. “Akshara’s gift survived,” he said. His voice, somehow, did not tremble.

“ _Oh_ ,” Chirrut breathed. He caught Baze’s hand just as it was about to draw back, holding on to it tightly as he lifted the lid.

Sweet scent filled the room, nearly thick enough to chase away the scent of scorched history and charred homes. Chirrut’s fingers skittered over the glass bottles inside, and his shoulders shook.

Amongst their brothers and sisters was a joke nearly two decades old: the best gift for Baze and Chirrut, whether for their name-days or as congratulations, was always oil. It was what they needed the most.

The first time they had received practically a stockpile of bottles, Baze had blushed to the tips of his ears, and Chirrut had laughed before making a grand show of thanking each and every single brother and sister.

“Is it this one?” Chirrut asked.

His long, slim fingers – knuckles callused – was wrapped around one particular bottle. It was long and slim with bevelled edges, made of glass to show the warm golden colour of the oil inside. When Chirrut thumbed over the top, the subtle scent of sandalwood permeated the room; long strips of the precious wood had been soaked into the almond base oil.

Chirrut took a deep breath, and made a pleased sound at the base of his throat.

Like this, surrounded by the things that they had gathered through their lives together, Baze could almost – _almost_ – forget all that they had lost.

Then Chirrut turned his face towards him. The curve of the lips remained the same, but there were new wrinkles on his face, and his eyes were blue. They were so blue.

And Baze remembered again.

“Are you going to sit there all this time?”

“No,” Baze said. His voice had gotten stuck in his throat again, so he cleared it. “I… Lie down?”

When Chirrut did, Baze plucked the box out of his hands and set it to the side again. The bottle he left standing there before he climbed over Chirrut’s body. Chirrut swung his arms around Baze’s neck. His eyes were so blue.

Baze kissed him, and told himself he wasn’t doing it because he needed to look away. He laid Chirrut down, one hand behind his head to guide him to the pillow, and told himself that again when Chirrut arched up to him like he always did; when his leg swung over Baze’s hip to rest his heel on the small of his back. 

Chirrut kissed him like he always did: too rough with his teeth scraping over Baze’s lips, tongue rubbing over Baze’s teeth with his impatience, and his hand tugging on Baze’s long hair. Baze let himself think, just for a moment, that everything had changed.

His hand travelled down Chirrut’s body, trailing the muscles that had been left untouched, and he asked, asked, voice wrecked and tremulous against Chirrut’s lips, “Will you let me do that thing you like?” 

Fingers brushed Baze’s jaw, then moved up to cup his cheek. The sight of Chirrut’s eyes twisted at something deep inside his stomach, but Chirrut was smiling still. “What better time is there for that?” he cocked his head, fingers walking down to Baze’s shoulder and skittering down his chest. “If I start making a racket, there’s no one to disturb.”

Baze closed his eyes. He took a deep, shuddering breath. He didn’t want to remember. He wanted to be here, with Chirrut, in this room where nothing had changed. He wanted to pretend.

If he pretended hard enough, he would forget how Chirrut looked like, sounded like, when he was writhing in bed, suffering from a pain that Baze could not alleviate.

Swallowing, Baze said, “Here,” through a closing throat, and slipped his hand beneath the first layer of Chirrut’s robes to find the ties he had helped Chirrut knot this morning. He loosened them with a tug of his fingers. “Let’s get you out of this.”

Surely Chirrut could still tell what he was thinking, what he was avoiding. But he lifted his hips and raised himself up so Baze could undress him. When he tried to help, Baze batted his fingers away and instead pressed his lips to Chirrut’s neck, breathing against the soft, warm skin even as he tossed all of the cloth over the edge of the raised platform.

The body beneath him, the body he had touched and loved for over twenty years… it was still the same. Like this, Baze could still believe. If he didn’t look at Chirrut’s eyes, there was still something he could hold onto.

When they were both dressed in nothing but their own skins, Chirrut stretched out from underneath Baze, arm stretching upwards to touch the wall behind his head. His legs spread around Baze’s hips.

Long, long stretches of golden skin. Unlike Baze, he was mostly hairless, with only a soft fuzz that started below his navel and headed southwards to disappear into the thatch of dark curls between his legs where his cock, long and slim and as familiar to Baze as his own, rose half-hard.

Baze wrapped his hand around it. Chirrut jerked, hissing out a breath, and his hands fell onto the bedroll, clawing at the cloth. Baze watched him, stroking slow and steady even as he reached over to pick up the bottle of oil, snapping the top open with thumb.

“ _Oh_ ,” Chirrut breathed when Baze let the oil pour down onto his hip before replacing the top. He arched up to Baze’s touch, his curve of his spine well-known and beloved, as Baze dragged his fingers down his stomach downwards, slicking up his cock before moving backwards, tips nudging at the clenched rim of his hole.

When he slipped a finger in, Chirrut did something he had never done before: he threw his entire body upwards, fucking into Baze’s hand even as he seemed to try to escape his grasp. His head turned, burying his face into the pillow. 

And his eyes flew open.

Before Baze could stop himself, he pushed two fingers inside at an angle that was now engraved on his joints. Chirrut cried out again, hips lifting away from the bed, his fingers clawing at the sheets now, the susurrations of his nails scraping cloth loud in the small confined space of their bedroom.

“Please,” Chirrut gasped. He dipped his head down. “Please, _Baze_.”

Usually, Baze revelled in making him beg. All that Chirrut could do, all that Chirrut _was,_ all given up to him in a moment of pleasure.

But Chirrut’s eyes were open, and they were so blue.

Baze ducked his head down. He didn’t want to see.

Pulling his fingers out, he slammed them in hard as he closed his lips around a nipple and sucked _hard_. Chirrut’s cry echoed so loud around the room, louder than he had ever been when Baze had done this before, and there was a hitch growing in his voice.

That hitch grew into a crack when Baze drew out his fingers and smeared oil over three of them now and pushed them back inside. Chirrut’s thighs were trembling now, and he was clenching the sheets so hard that they were loosening from where they had been knotted against the edges of the bedrolls. Baze didn’t want to look at his face, didn’t want to look at his eyes, so he fucked Chirrut steadily with his fingers while his tongue flicked at one nipple, then the next.

“ _Please_!” A full-formed word amidst gasps and wordless cries. Baze lifted his head up, and his chest seized at the sight of the tear tracks on Chirrut’s cheeks. There was a hint of blue at the edge of vision, so he jerked his head away, but.

But Chirrut’s knuckles were white on the sheets, and his cock was only half-hard against his thigh still. Usually… usually, he would be so hard that he was making a mess of his own skin.

“Chirrut,” Baze whispered. That knot inside his chest grew, threatening to squeeze out every breath. He made to pull out again, but Chirrut shook his head, and his toes nudged hard against Baze’s wrist.

“Don’t stop,” he said. His hand rose from the sheets, and Baze tilted his head to meet it. Rough knuckles scraped over his jaw. “It’s okay. It’s okay. Just keep going. You don’t have to stop.”

All he wanted for things to be the same. But Chirrut had never said anything like this.

Squeezing his eyes shut, Baze nodded. He lifted himself up to his knees, his fingers jarring slightly where they were still buried inside Chirrut’s body, and Chirrut _twisted_ hard, hand falling back to the sheets and white creeping back to his knuckles. When Baze did it again, the veins on Chirrut’s neck stood out as he threw his head back, gasping through swollen, parted lips.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Maybe he should try another way.

“I’m going to,” he started, and then stopped. Chirrut didn’t need him to say what he was doing; he could always tell. He would still be able to tell, because nothing had changed.

Reaching for the oil again, he poured it over his hand and slicked up his own cock. Chirrut shivered when Baze’s hand slid from his waist to his hips, but he still folded his legs back the same way when Baze touched his thighs. He still gasped and bit his lip when Baze’s fingertips teased at his slick, open hole.

When Baze pushed inside, Chirrut jerked again, a full-body spasm like lightning had been jabbed into his nerves, and he _screamed_.

Before the Temple fell, this would be the time when people started banging on their doors. It was earlier than usual, but it was similar enough.

But there was no one left who would yell at them for disturbing their sleep. No one who would care. Baze closed his eyes when they started to burn. He lowered his head and buried his face into Chirrut’s neck, and started to move.

Chirrut smelled the same as he always did. There was a hint of sour sweat because neither of them had showered in two days, the barest note of ash and flames, and an overwhelming wash of salt that tasted like bitter pain. But underneath all that, if Baze ignored all that, if he grit his teeth and breathed past the growing knot in his stomach, he could still smell the scent of Chirrut’s skin.

The hint of musk that had not changed.

His hands closed around Chirrut’s waist, and he thrust even harder. Beneath him, Chirrut was jerking, his chin brushing Baze’s hair over and over as he tossed his head from side to side, and the room echoed and echoed with the sound of his bitten-off screams and hitching sobs.

It was familiar. Like the scent of boiling water mixed with panic. Like the sound of fervent, desperate prayers mixed with pained screams. Like…

“Don’t stop, don’t stop,” Chirrut was telling him. His nails were raising welts down Baze’s shoulders and arms. “Please, Baze. Please.”

His cock, pressed against Baze’s thigh, had gone completely soft.

This wasn’t how things usually went. There was something wrong, something broken, and Baze knew but there was nothing else he could do to turn everything back to how it should be. There was no ground beneath his feet except for this body under him, surrounding him. There was no world within reach except for this voice echoing and echoing in his ears and marked upon his bones.

When he came, it took him by surprise. Baze buried his face into Chirrut’s neck and thrust in as deep as he could go, buried himself into Chirrut’s body as he spilled inside. His grip on Chirrut’s waist was so tight that he could feel his heartbeat, fast and shallow like birds beating their wings against a too-small cage. 

Chirrut’s twisting sob twined tight around his bones; strangling, breaking. 

He lifted his head. Chirrut’s eyes were open again. The tears that filled them made the blank, shadeless blue shine like kyber.

Baze slapped a hand over them. He didn’t want to see. He leaned over, and kissed Chirrut hard. He _didn’t_ want to _see_. He moved his hand down and took hold of Chirrut’s soft cock, and started to stroke like he always did.

A little rough, with a scrape of nail beneath the head. Paying most attention to the prominent vein. Chirrut jerked beneath him again, Baze’s name escaping his lips in a mangled whisper, and more tears spilled from between Baze’s fingers.

“Don’t go,” Baze said. He didn’t know where the words were coming from, only that they were needed. “Don’t go. I’m here. I’m here.”

Chirrut’s head tilted back. “ _Please_ ,” he said. “I can’t- I _can’t—_ ” 

Baze stroked him a little harder, and his voice trailed off into a hitching scream. The nails on Baze’s arms had broken skin. Baze could feel the hot droplets of blood start to trail downwards. He ignored the pain.

It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t the same. But if he could just- if he could _just_ —

When Chirrut came, he did so with a wrenching sob that reached deep inside Baze to tighten the knot in his stomach and yank it all out, tearing his abdomen open and trailing his insides all over.

He lifted his hand. Chirrut had his eyes closed, his cheek on the pillow. He was breathing fast and shallow, his ribs heaving like the quick-beating wings of a hummingbird.

“Don’t go,” Baze said again. He pulled out, finally, and watched as Chirrut shudder. It was familiar enough that he slipped his fingers inside Chirrut’s hole again, curving before pulling out to let his come and the oil drip out.

This time, Chirrut jerked so hard that he ripped the sheets loose from their ties on the bed.

“Baze,” he said. His arm dropped over his eyes and his smile was so crooked, so wrong, so strange. “I _can’t_.”

 _I don’t know what you mean_ , Baze wanted to say. But he had never been a good liar. Not to Chirrut.

He could only rest his head on Chirrut’s shoulder and try to breathe. Chirrut didn’t say a word. His hands remained at his sides, still half-clawed. Baze swallowed hard, and tasted salt and bitterness so heavy that he could almost choke on it.

Eventually, he found the energy to lift himself off. He plucked free the sheets they were lying on and used their corners to wipe at Chirrut and himself. They would have to be burned in the morning, and the bedroll left bare. Something else lost.

Making to stand, Baze paused when Chirrut caught his arm and pulled him back down.

“Let’s sleep here,” Chirrut said. “One last time.”

He smiled, and placed his hand on Baze’s cheek.

Then, Baze already knew what he meant. But he didn’t want to see it.

So he agreed. He laid on his side on the bedroll and closed his eyes. He tried to wait until Chirrut was asleep, because the sound of his even breaths had always lulled Baze into slumber, but he couldn’t.

But his arms were still around Chirrut. It was something he could hold on to.

***

When Baze blinked his eyes open, darkness had fully descended into the room, and Chirrut was already awake.

His eyes were closed, but he was straddling Baze’s waist with his hands sunk into the bedroll beside his head. The nagging sense of being watched that had woken Baze up could have only come from him. 

“You have to go,” Chirrut said.

Baze froze, hand hovering there in mid-air where it had been about to touch Chirrut’s face. “What?” he croaked out.

Chirrut tilted his head, and gave Baze an expression he had never seen on this face he knew so well. Chirrut the fiery, Chirrut with the bared teeth, should never have sorrow hang around him like mist after a thunderstorm.

His hand cupped Baze’s face. “I can’t be what you need,” Chirrut said, voice so soft. “If you stay here, then you’ll never find something else to hold on to.”

 _I don’t need anything else than you_ , Baze wanted to say. _I don’t want anything else than you_. 

What could he have, if not Chirrut? What could fit his rough-hewn fingers so well other than Chirrut’s body?

He made to speak, but it was then that Chirrut opened his eyes. The pale blue shone so bright in the darkness, more brilliant than his face.

And Baze flinched, and tried to look away.

“See?” Chirrut’s thumb stroked over his cheekbone, tilting his face back to look at him with cruel gentleness. “You need something else to hold on to. Something that is not me.”

His fingertips trailed over Baze’s hairline. The catches they made in the tangles wrenched at something deep within Baze, something that felt like a helpless sob.

Reaching out, Baze brushed the back of his fingers over that beloved face. Chirrut had not changed, he tried to tell himself, but he could feel the stickiness of the dried tear tracks muddied with fresh tears, slipping from Chirrut’s blind eyes.

And he knew.

“I’m hurting you,” Baze whispered. “As long as I am here, I will always hurt you.”

Fingers trailing up Chirrut’s face, he brushed the tips over those blue, blue eyes. Chirrut closed them, but he still knew what laid beneath those thin, fluttering lids. He swallowed.

“I have to go so I will not destroy you.”

Chirrut shook his head. “Your weight will not destroy me,” he said. He caught Baze’s hand, turning his head to nuzzle against it in a gesture that was strangely unaccompanied by his usual nip. “You must go because you deserve a world, Baze. Not just one man.”

But Chirrut had been his world. Baze would have turned his back to everything he had ever known for his sake. He _did_ turn his back on one world for his sake.

Closing his eyes, he wrapped his arms around Chirrut. He felt the weight of him lying on his chest, so familiar. He took his hands, tangling their fingers together, and pressed kisses on Chirrut’s knuckles. With each kiss, he told himself all that Chirrut would not say:

 _You will crush me if you stay. You will force me to become someone I no longer am. For your sake, I will have to pretend. For your sake, I will have to lock myself away and be forever caged_.

“Look for the Force,” Chirrut murmured. “It will lead you to where you need to be.”  
_  
_ Baze’s shoulders shook. “I am where I need to be,” he said. “But here is exactly where you need me to not be.”

He took a deep breath. He tipped his head down, and pressed a kiss against Chirrut’s forehead. “I will go.”

Chirrut didn’t speak for long moments. When he did, it was only say, “Will you get me my staff?”

“Of course,” Baze said, though he didn’t want to leave this bed and head out to the hallway where there were signs of the Empire’s destruction. He trailed his fingers over Chirrut’s soft, short hair only once before Chirrut rolled off of him.

Baze stood up. The staff was where they had left it, lying right outside the door of their rooms. He picked it up and headed back in, but before he could approach the bed, Chirrut raised a hand.

“Throw it to me,” he said.

The staff was heavy. Made of uneti wood from a single tree that Chirrut had found after a long, gruelling three-month pilgrimage out of the city and hardened by flames fed by the hearts of kyber, it could easily break metal, much less bone.

Baze walked over and laid the staff on the edge of the platform. He took Chirrut’s hand, and rested those fingers on the wood. And Chirrut…

Chirrut’s shoulders shook. He smiled, crooked, and brushed his fingertips over Baze’s jaw.

“You have to go,” he repeated. “You can’t stay here.”

This time, Baze didn’t know why. He swallowed and closed his eyes. With his next hissing exhale, he said, “For how long?”

“Seven years,” Chirrut said. When Baze’s head shot up, eyes widening, Chirrut smiled at him with open eyes. “I don’t want to feel your presence here in the city for seven years, Baze.”

Since the day they met, they had never been apart for longer than three months. But Chirrut was telling him, and Chirrut was the ground beneath his feet.

Even if Chirrut was telling him to leave, to walk into thin air with nothing to stop him from sinking into the abyss, he would.

“Seven years,” Baze echoed. He closed his fingers around Chirrut’s, both of them holding onto the tip of the staff with the kyber crystals together. “Let this be your reminder of me.”

When Chirrut kissed him, it tasted of salt and bitterness from both of their tears.

That night, Baze left. He walked backwards: his eyes to Chirrut, and his back to wherever the tides of change would lead him. Every single step was a promise.

He would return. He would return to stay, and he would not hurt Chirrut. He would not destroy him. That was the only reason why he would leave.

Stormtroopers had overrun the city, their footsteps echoing and echoing through the emptied streets, wrapping around half-voiced screams. 

The Temple had crumbled, centuries of history fallen away to leave only broken stones, more worthless than ash and bones. 

Baze saw none of it. All he saw was blue; the blue of the kyber crystals in Chirrut’s staff, the blue of the cold-clear mornings with Chirrut by his side. The blue of Chirrut’s eyes.

He heard none of it. All he heard was the sound of Chirrut’s voice; of the tremor caught by the air, their unvoiced goodbyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The sex scene I’m talking about is from the middle to the end of the second scene. In it, Baze fucks Chirrut while entirely focused on his own needs, and overstimulates a newly-blind Chirrut to the point where he’s crying out in pain that Baze takes to be pleasure. Throughout all of it, Chirrut gives his consent over and over again, but it’s obvious to readers – and not to Baze – that he’s doing it for Baze’s sake instead of truly wanting it.
> 
> Consent is so murky in that scene that I don’t have a term for it. Please just skip it if it makes you uncomfortable. Furthermore, Baze goes through the entire scene with overt disgust over Chirrut's blindness, and he deliberately shuts himself away from it. Chirrut's behaviour also more than hints towards internalised ableism.
> 
> This is supposed to be a sweet, fluffy pairing. (I ruin everything I touch.)


	4. 不忠宇, “unfaithful to the universe”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you’re still here after the last chapter, this one is… not worse, but more insidious, more sinister. Basically: Baze is a stalker, and still nothing is okay. But maybe, just maybe, things are improving.

“Don’t go. Don’t go. I’m here. I’m here.”

_As the ground explodes beneath you, as you feel your body being ripped to shreds by flames, you hear his footsteps. You hear his voice, and you grieve._

_Not for yourself. The Force has been kind to you. It has given you decades to live when there are children who die before they reach their first. It now gives you a cause to die for when so many lives had been ended senselessly. Even now, it is kind: your ears should be deafened by the blast, but you still hear him._

_You hear him, and you say:_

“It’s okay. It’s okay. Look for the Force—”

_For so many years you have tried to give him something beyond yourself. For so many years you have failed, and felt the weight of his faith, his reason for living, weigh heavier and heavier on your shoulders and twine in your chest, heavy enough to choke. For so many years you have prayed fervently, powered by a faith that was desperate and selfish._

__“Chirrut—”  
 __  
Your faith is for his sake. You can only hope that the Force will forgive you the insincerity.  
  
“And you will always find me.”

_Even now, breaths away from joining the Force, it is only a brief whisper at the back of your mind. His hand clutching yours – so tight, he always holds on so tight – is far more solid. Your love for him has filled you since that very first day you met; since you saw him in his white changshan and placed filthy handprints all over it and stained him forever._

_You do not regret that. You will never regret having him. You will never regret the paths that you have taken because of him._

_The Force will forgive you for using it for his sake. You hope. You hope.  
_  
“The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force.”  
 __  
Now you do regret: that you no longer have a voice for the other half of the prayer. The two of you prayed like this together once, long years ago; partners in the prayer room like you had been in the training hall, like you are in bed and in life and everything else. The Force has given him to you and you have held on tight to him.

_He gave you the kyber crystals on your staff; the crystals that helped you see after you asked to be made blind. There is nothing in your life, nothing in you, that does not have his handprints._

_But he deserves so much more_.

“The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force.”

_You are fading and you are leaving him behind. He has vowed to follow you and to you he has always been faithful. To you he has kept all of his promises even as he has left a trail of broken oaths in his wake; bells braided into his hair, singing and haunting.  
_  
“The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force.”  
 __  
But now you want him to break his promise to you. Selfish and capricious as you are, you want him to turn faithless to you, too.

_You want him to live. You hope that he lives._

_As you die, as your ears grow deaf to the world like your eyes grew dark so many years ago, you try to form one last prayer:_

_Let him live. Don’t let him follow me._

_Let him live.  
_  
***

Chirrut had said: _I don’t want to feel your presence in the city for seven years._

For the first five years, he listened to the wish and not the words. With his first steps into every world he visited, he exorcised from his mind the sound of Chirrut’s voice.

He replaced it with his own instead: _You must not be in Jedha for seven years_.

At the beginning of the sixth years, the whispers came. At first, they only appeared in the deep of the night, when he was surrounded by nothing but the breathing of others to occupy his ears and mind. Chirrut’s voice came to him like a wisp of wind, like a breeze from the sea – a sea he now knew, a sea with salt that lingered heavy on his tongue like tears – coiling around his ankles on long nights.

The whispers said: _He doesn’t have to feel your presence for you to see him_. They murmured with voices that stroked down his spine: _He’s blind_.

So Baze replaced his old prayer, unsaid for these five years, with a new one: _I have never broken a promise to him. I will not, now. I will not_. 

It served him well for almost a year. But the whispers transmogrified to flashes of blue at the corner of his eyes; to too-wide smiles on trembling lips of the targets at the end of his scopes; to fingers that stroked his cock in tandem with his own during those nights when loneliness and desperate desire threatened to drown him in his own breath.

Like all prayers, those words remained just words. They could not be anything more.

On the sixth anniversary of the day he left Chirrut behind, Baze returned to Jedha City.

He stepped off the ship onto the sand of a spaceport that was still to the east of the city. The last to alight, the stairs drew up and the ship immediately left. A gale started as it did, blowing sand into Baze’s face and embedding grains into the long, tangled tail he now kept, resting along the middle of his back.

In the years before the Empire, whether under the rule of the now-old age or the supposedly revolutionary middle, the spaceport had always been crowded. There used to be pilgrims landing at every moment, bleary and shivering from the cold that they instantly forgot as they turned their eyes west, towards the city. 

Now the spaceport echoed with each of Baze’s heavy steps. The high city gates that had claimed so much of the pilgrims’ astonishment were gone: all which remained were half-broken pillars, with rubble still scattered at their feet. Where the Temple had used to stand, the high and proud beacon so many had followed, there was nothing but a broken-down building, capped off with a Star Destroyer that hovered over it. 

Even the horizon had changed: the squat, grey buildings that used to crowd the city, the second layer of glittering monotony that rose above the brown sand, had nearly all disappeared. The marketplace wasn’t immediately visible either: the colourful awning was gone, all blown away by the fierce gale that was the Empire’s rule over the city. 

Only the cold, blazing sun overhead had remained the same. Baze wondered how long it would be before the Empire took that, too.

He walked. He did not know where he could find Chirrut, so he allowed his feet to take him wherever they liked. When the scent of _mantou_ and _baozi_ reached his nose, he was unsurprised. He did not smile.

There were credits in his pocket, earned through the spilling of blood. They were clean when he drew one out to pay for the food, buying a couple of buns filled with roasted sweet meat. 

The twist on the top of the bun had not changed. The little red dot, made with dye made by boiling a cactus flower that was native to the moon, was as bright as ever. But when Baze bit down, there was sand in the flour and bark in the meat. 

He did not choke, swallowing instead. With the streets so empty of pilgrims, he expected nothing less. He continued to walk, heading southwards towards the centre of the city. 

The crowds were thicker here; there _were_ crowds here. But all gave him a wide berth, giving the oversized blaster on his belt the respect that it deserved.

“May the Force of others be with you!” 

Baze closed his eyes. The ruined Temple in front of him, Chirrut’s voice echoing around him: he was surrounded by ghosts made terribly real. 

But there was too much solidity in the voice that repeated and repeated even as footsteps continued to echo, obviously ignoring it. Too much solidity in broken walls and the pristine room still hidden within – was it still pristine? – that lingered at the back of his eyelids, refusing to be erased no matter how many different winds he had felt throughout these years.

When he opened his eyes, he saw red, first. Red the colour of NaJedha that spun slow in the distance, half-lit by the cold sun. Red the colour of the sand beneath his feet. Red, like an eighth _duan_ Guardian’s under-robe that had been washed, over and over, until the colours faded away.

Chirrut sat on the steps on the Temple, elbows on his knees and hands held out loosely. There was a beggar’s bowl right in front of it that had only a few, miserly credits. 

“May the Force of others be with you!” 

His staff rested on the sand, barely a couple of inches from his feet. The iridescent glow of the tip had dimmed terribly, and there were empty, gaping spaces where crystals had used to sit. But the wood itself still looked polished; far better cared for than the robes that draped over Chirrut’s form.

Black had washed out into dull greys, splotchy at some places and ripped at the sleeves and the hems. One entire side had been replaced with leather that still looked new, the brown clashing with the grey but somehow managing to fit the ragged tail that laid limp over one shoulder, the jagged bangs that almost shielded those blue, blind eyes and set the asceticism into harsh relief.

Chirrut had asked Baze to leave; had practically ordered him to do so. Chirrut had said: _You need something else to hold on to. Something that is not me._

What had Chirrut had to hold on to in these six years? What had he had except for the shattered pieces and empty places where his heart had used to be?

Baze wanted, _ached_ , to go to him.

But Chirrut had said: _I don’t want to feel your presence in the city for seven years._ And Baze had prayed: _I have never broken a promise to him. I will not, now. I will not_.

Prayers, he knew, came true only for those who forced them into being by sheer will.

“May the Force of others be with you!”

He ducked into an alleyway, taking care to make his footsteps silent.

There were many paths Baze could have taken when he left Jedha. His size and strength could have had him hired as a ship’s hand, travelling on merchant trips; or even an escort, to protect cargo from the bandits and thieves that roamed the galaxy. His quick hands and talent with machines could have had him hired as a mechanic on any Inner Rim planets, and his sharp eyes could even have landed him a job as a pilot once he had learned enough about a ship’s workings.

Maybe he could have even settled into one of those many planets and eked out a life there as a farmer. Maybe on Alderaan, where the soils were rich, the air warm, and the people plentiful.

But he chose to soak himself in blood to his elbows instead. 

Prayers were only words, and whispers were only words. All that Baze knew, all that was in him, was made for something that was simultaneously more solid and more ephemeral.

Chirrut had said: _I don’t want to feel your presence in the city for seven years._

Only by killing would he learn how to keep himself hidden from Chirrut’s Force-sharpened senses; from even his darkness-honed ears.

It was worth it, he told himself. It was worth it, because now he knew what he had to do. What his instincts had called him back here, a year early, to do.

“May the Force of others be with you!”

A child ran in front of him, down towards the end of the alley. Baze reached it, and grabbed hold of a collar.

“Hey,” he said.

The girl did not scream at the sight of him. There was a gauntness to her cheeks that haunted with its familiarity. The collar under Baze’s hand was not grey, instead of some indistinguishable colour impossible to tell due to the frayed nature of its threads.

“What do you want?” she spat at him, her Basic rough and sharp.

Baze dug into his pockets and took out a handful of credits. “Here,” he told her. “You give all of these to that man over there. Put it into his bowl.”

“That man?” she squinted at him, youthful suspicion writ over every line of her body. “You mean the crazy old Guardian?”

Chirrut was still a year shy of forty. Baze forced a sigh. “Yeah, him,” he said. Her eyes were fixed on the credits in his hand, so he felt safe enough to let go of her to dig once more into his pockets, picking out two. “If you do that, you get these.”

Her eyes widened at the sight of the money, and then narrowed again. “That seems too easy. What’s the catch?”

_There’s none_ , Baze wanted to say, but he had learned how to speak to children like her in the long years he had been away. “I’ll be watching to make sure that you don’t cheat me,” he said instead, and patted the blaster on his hip. “That’s the catch.”

She didn’t speak for long moments, but the tension eased out of her frame almost immediately. Chirrut, Baze thought, would be proud.

( _This is blood money you are giving him._

_You are breaking your promise_.)

“Fine,” the girl said. She held out her hands. “Give that to me.”

Baze did. He watched as she ran towards Chirrut. He watched as Chirrut stilled at the sound of the money clanking into his bowl; watched as he reached out and pulled it close, hands splaying out and blind eyes widening at the feel of the amount. He watched as the girl ran back and Chirrut’s head snapped immediately towards her. He pressed himself harder to the wall, fading back into the shadows.

When the girl started tapping her feet, staring at him, Baze tossed her the two credits she was due. 

“Why can’t you give the old crazy man the money yourself?” the girl asked.

Out on the Temple steps, Chirrut was rubbing his fingers over the credits. Baze wondered if he could smell the blood on the metal and plastic; if he could smell _him_.

“Because I don’t want him to see me,” he answered distractedly.

“I’m not sure if you noticed,” the girl said, voice full of the world-weariness of the very young. “But that old man is _blind_.”

Baze flicked a smile down towards her without taking his eyes off Chirrut. Chirrut who was now slipping the credits into his sleeves, his hands curling around the staff at his feet.

“I don’t want him to see me,” he repeated.

( _You have broken your promise_.)

“Oh,” she said. “Uh… Would you need someone to give him money tomorrow?”

Finally, Baze turned his eyes towards her. She was staring up to him, eyes filled with a guarded expectancy.

If she had been born before the Empire came, she would have been one of those orphans that Chirrut had always been so desperate to care for and feed.

“Sure,” Baze said. He turned his attention back to Chirrut again. 

It would make it easier for Chirrut to guess that it was Baze who was giving all this to him. 

“Come here at around the same time, then.”

For five years, Baze had tried so hard to listen to the wish instead of the words. If Chirrut sought him out, then…

Seeking was _wanting_ , wasn’t it? If Chirrut wanted to find him… then Baze surely wasn’t breaking his promise.

*

Baze spent the next year hunting.

First:

North of Jedha City were parts that were ignored by the revolution and untouched for the Empire. Years ago, with the blisters on his hand holding the uneti tree far too tight, Chirrut had told him breathlessly that there was an oasis there, out in the desert; a pool of water that glimmered under the cold sun, surrounded by a copse of cactus trees that bloomed bright colours.

Baze headed out there. The oasis had nearly dried up by now, but the cacti still lived, and they still bloomed. The flowers were so rich in colour that they streaked red on his fingers. He tore out strips from the bottoms of his flight suit for a makeshift pouch, and kept them there.

The night he returned, he had the girl leave the flowers, a basin of water, and a gas stove at the door of the new apartment Chirrut lived in; near the broken-down building that had used to be the orphanage, because the Empire had taken both it and the Temple from him too. 

Then Baze waited.

Three days later, the red of Chirrut’s sash was no longer faded. The red gleamed like blood, the colour made sharper and starker by the light that glinted off the kyber crystal on his staff. 

Second:

The Temple of the Whills had always made the cloth for their own robes: it was part of the initiation ceremony for the third _duan_. 

First, the acolytes would strip fibres from the tall, nearly leafless bamboo plants that grew in the gardens – one the likes of which Baze had never seen away from Jedha, the species having adapted to the moon’s acrid, sandy soil – and then soaked those fibres into their own acidic sap for two weeks. The loom that spun thread into cloth had been made from the same bamboo, the only material aside from uneti that was hard enough to not break under the strain of the cloth. The dye had been made from the tiny insects that pollinated the plants.

Before he left for the red dye, Baze crept back inside the Temple. All of the trees had wilted, but the bamboo was a hardy plant, and there were some that still lived, though their saps had all dried. Baze ripped them out by the roots, and carried them out of the Temple.

South of the city were the farms that produced the wrinkled, ugly fruits that were sold in the market; the fruits which had skins that belied the sweet juiciness inside. He begged favour from a farmer with credits and some judicious use of his blaster, and planted the bamboo in the corner of their farm, right at the edges of the irrigation pipes that collected rain from the rare, raging storms.

When he returned with red streaks on his hands from the dye, the bamboo had sap again. He allowed the farmer to keep the two new shoots that were poking out of the soil in return for the use of his barn house. He soaked the fibres. He made the loom.

The insects traditionally used were gone, most likely extinct. But in the south of Jedha lived black beetles with horns on their heads; beetles that took waste and turned it into food for the plants. Baze captured as many as he could without threatening to destroy the soil, and soaked their shells in the remnants of the sap that remained after the fibres had gone soft.

Half a year after he set foot back on Jedha, after he broke his promise, Baze sent the girl to deliver to Chirrut’s door three bolts of cloth, all gleaming black under the sunlight.

A week later, Chirrut’s robes matched his sash in brightness and starkness. 

Third:

Baze had lived frugally for five years but his credits were still running out. Besides, there had been murmurs of his name that could be heard in the backwater city of Jedha.

When he left the city again, he walked backwards with his face turned towards the direction of the Temple; of Chirrut. He kept the image of Chirrut – wearing brilliant black robes and a bright red sash while his too-long hair draped over his shoulder – in his mind as he killed.

His mark was wearing black leather, made from bantha hide. Before he could think twice, Baze took it off of him, and slung it over his shoulder. He received his payment with blood still on his hands and face, dripping down to his feet. 

If he was helping to fill Chirrut’s cheeks with blood-soaked credits, then he would dress him in death-drenched leather as well. If he was to touch Chirrut again…

He washed the leather on the foreign planet – the name of which, like so many others, he didn’t bother to remember. On the ship back to Jedha, he borrowed heavy thread and thick needle, and stitched together two pieces that could be easily joined together for Chirrut’s new robes.

Baze might not have the numbers, but the shape of Chirrut’s bones was imprinted upon his own. He knew his size well enough.

When his feet stepped upon Jedhan soil again, when he raised his hand to shade his eyes from the unforgiving old sun overhead, it had been two months to seven years since he had said a word to Chirrut; since, he hoped, Chirrut had felt his presence.

The girl was sent once more to Chirrut’s door, huffing and puffing under the weight of the leather despite how her cheeks had filled out in the past few months.

This time, it took only a day before Chirrut appeared with black leather instead of brown on his robes. He kept the patterns that Baze had stitched; the patterns he had created out of necessity when he cut out the blaster holes.

Last:

Only the kyber crystals were left.

The Temple sat above the biggest deposit on the entirety of the moon, above the network of caves. The Empire had set its Star Destroyer there, and stormtroopers could be found patrolling and mining at all hours of the day.

But they had only five years of knowledge to Baze’s nineteen, and so he took one of the hidden passageways and headed downwards. He used the same skills he had been using for the past almost-year to hide from Chirrut to hide from the stormtroopers. It was almost too easy; the stormtroopers with their clanging, clacking boots made being silent easy even in the echoing caves.

Still, it took him three different trips before he found crystals of the sizes he needed. Four he found on the floor, abandoned surely because they were far too small for the Empire’s needs. Three others he plucked from Chirrut’s favourite mural on the twenty-fifth level below ground, in one of the deepest caves where the only light source was the glow of kyber.

He finished cutting and polishing the crystals on the seventh anniversary of the day he had left Jedha City; when he left Chirrut behind.

This time, he gave the girl money and sent her away. He walked up to the door himself, and knocked.

Chirrut opened the door wearing all that Baze had given him: the red sash, the black robe, the leather shoulder armour. He held his staff in his hand, the light of the sole kyber crystal left was caught by the seven that were held in Baze’s outstretched hands.

Baze had dreamed of this moment for seven years. _You’re late,_ he thought Chirrut might say. Perhaps Chirrut might smile at him and cup his face; perhaps he might say, _I’ve missed you._

During his more foolish moments, Baze imagined Chirrut’s voice saying, _I never meant what I said. I never wanted you to go._

This was what Chirrut granted him instead: his hand over his, folding the fingers back to close over the crystals, his newest gifts. And he said:

“No.”

Here was the first word Baze said directly to Chirrut in seven years:

“What?”

Chirrut shook his head. There was a faint hint of a smile on his face, so unlike the wide grin that had writ itself on Baze’s skin.

He stepped backwards. “Come in,” he said. Helplessly, Baze obeyed. 

The first thing Baze saw on the apartment was the bareness of his walls. The next, before Chirrut crowded him against the door, was the bedroll that was spread out and rumpled, and the one next to it: rolled and pristinely kept. The same two that they had shared together, back at the Temple.

His breath hitched.

“Do you know where the crystals have gone?” Chirrut asked.

“Yes,” Baze said, for he had learned to couple nods with words in the five years away. He could do nothing else when he could not stop seeing pale blue out of the corner of his eyes. “For food. For water. For this place.”

“That’s only half of it,” Chirrut said. He splayed his hand over Baze’s cheek. His skin was so warm, with far more heat than the cold sun that shone above their moon. “The other half…”

He hesitated. Baze’s hand trembled as he reached up to clasp Chirrut’s against his own face.

“Maybe if I sold all of them, then I could forget about you,” Chirrut said. His other hand gripped tight to Baze’s sleeve. “If the world I see through kyber is no longer coloured by you…”

Baze sank his other hand into Chirrut’s hair, tugging out the piece of cloth that kept it in its tangled tail. When Chirrut tipped his head up, leaning in to him, Baze leaned their foreheads together.

They breathed against each other. Baze said, “Do you still want to forget?”

“You deserve to have a world,” Chirrut said. His shoulders shook, just once. This close, Baze could see the tears gathering on his lashes. “You deserve to have a universe.”

On the day that the Force had made him blind, Chirrut had not cried. On the days before, he had sobbed and screamed, but his eyes had remained dry.

“Chirrut,” Baze said. He brushed his fingers over those eyes. He did not say, _You are my world_ , for surely Chirrut already knew.

The tilt of Chirrut’s head towards Baze’s touch told him he was right. “You’ve learned,” Chirrut said. “For me.”

Gifts left half-finished on his door. Boiling water for the sash, needle and thread and scissors for robes and armour; all dangerous tools for a blind man.

It was not faith; it was memory. A brush in Chirrut’s hand, an awkward grip turning graceful in the matter of hours; a dictionary bought and then left on the bookshelf to gather dust in the manner of weeks; a tongue that once tripped uneasily over the language of the city that smoothed out so much that he was judged worthy of becoming the Temple’s representative.

“For you,” Baze echoed. He nudged his closed fist towards Chirrut again, reminding him of the crystals.

But Chirrut shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s not the same.”

_Oh_. Baze parted his lips, but nothing came out.

The kyber that now sat on Chirrut’s staff was a relic of Baze’s past; of the first world he had left behind for Chirrut’s sake. 

He opened his hands. The crystal clanked dully on the cold, bare stone floor of the apartment. He sank that hand once more into Chirrut’s hair. Chirrut nodded.

They pulled apart in tandem. Chirrut’s hand closed around his wrist, tugging, and Baze followed, his steps heralded by the _thud_ of his blaster on the ground. He glanced at the small table next to the bedroll, with the black lacquered box, the gift of a woman long-dead, set on top. Underneath were books—

No, not books. A folder: Chirrut’s writing practices, on the ink and paper of Baze’s abandoned clan. A sheaf of paper carefully hand-stitched together: Baze’s hand-copied version of the three hundred classical poems, still with its blackened edges.

Shattered pieces and empty places where a heart had used to be.

He stopped when Chirrut sat down. In front of them was a mirror, polished to a shine. Chirrut had no use for such a thing, Baze knew, and his heart felt too large to fit into his chest.

Baze reached down and took out his knife. He wrapped his fingers around Chirrut’s rope of hair, lifting it upwards and setting the sharp edge of the blade against the nape of his neck. Then he sliced it off with the cloth tie still attached.

Chirrut gave a shudder, and sighed. His hand slipped inside his sleeve, and he withdrew a pair of scissors. Their fingers brushed as Baze took them from him.

“Use these,” Chirrut said. He did not have to speak for Baze to understand: as he ran his fingertips over the edge, he could feel the remnants of the Temple that clung to the bamboo, the blood and death that had pervaded the leather.

He raised the scissors. Seven years had not been nearly enough to rid his muscles of the imprints carved into them by the practice of a hundred times. 

Careful around the ears; metal should not touch skin for Chirrut was ticklish there and he would jerk. Gentle around the neck; he must not give into the tempting heat there, or else he would be distracted.

Here was a change: when he circled the chair to reach the bangs that now nearly covered the whole of Chirrut’s face when they were not tucked away, those pale blue eyes were open. Baze met them in the mirror.

Another: as the soft, silky strands hit the ground, Baze leaned in and kissed those eyes, one after another, and tasted salt on his tongue.

Chirrut surged up towards him. The scissors clattered to the ground as Chirrut grabbed fistfuls of his flight suit.

Their mouths met and Chirrut kissed him like he always did: made clumsy by impatience and desire, his hand tugging at Baze’s hair, loosening the strands from the tie he kept at the nape of his neck.

“The Force brought you back to me,” Chirrut breathed into his mouth, the words mangled by raw desperation. “It was the Force that brought you back to me.”

Baze pulled away. There was no anger within him; only a hopeless, hysterical resignation.

Chirrut had sent him away, and Baze had left, because he didn’t want to ruin him. Yet he had. Yet he had.

He fell to his knees. He caught Chirrut’s tearing sob with his own lips, and stroked the curve of those cheeks that had filled out again in this past year.

“I go where you go,” he said. He did not smile. 

Once, he had believed in the Force; believed in its goodness, for it had brought him Chirrut. But now he knew better.

It was Chirrut who had first led him to the Force. It was for Chirrut’s sake that he had stayed to serve it. 

“That’s all I need.”

There had never been the Force; not for him. There was only Chirrut.

“You deserve more,” Chirrut said. His hand clenched in Baze’s hair, tugging at the strands. “You deserve a world.”

Baze smiled. He brushed the edges of Chirrut’s forehead, visible now that the bangs had been cut away. His fingers followed the edges of Chirrut’s face, and he brushed his thumb over the pain-etched lines at the edges of his eyes.

“Don’t you see?” he turned his head to kiss the wrist so near his mouth. “You have already given me a world.”

For six years Baze had wandered the universe. He had walked on ground that was not sand; his skin had felt the heat of suns that were warm; he had seen oceans and mountains and forests and waterfalls; and he had seen the brilliance of stars through the windows of a ship.

As he wiped away the tears that spilled down Chirrut’s cheeks, he said, “I have so much to tell you of my travels.”

And he kissed Chirrut’s eyes again, just so he could see the crookedness of his smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t think I can write straightforward things anymore. I’m just hoping that I’m still comprehensible despite my thing for complexities.
> 
> The next chapter is short, by the way, and it is the end.


	5. 不忠自, “unfaithful to the self”

_  
“Good luck, little sister.”  
_  
You have loved him from the moment you saw him. You hadn’t known it at the time, and even now, decades later, you still find it difficult to put it into words. But from the moment he jumped from that rooftop and sent sand scattering over you, your world had shifted entirely.

There are songs and legends about a love like yours, one that is so all-consuming that it threatens to swallow the world. One of your favourites is that of a woman who, devoured by her grief of her lover’s death, jumped into his grave, and the gods were so touched by their passion that they turned the lovers into butterflies, never to be parted. 

Perhaps it was the Force, and not the gods. It doesn’t matter. You have never wanted to become a legend or a song. You became famed, in your own way, at the Temple, but none of that mattered to you.

You only ever had one wish: to stay by his side, and to make him happy.

In the long years since you returned and you crafted your promise from shaky hands, you have practiced pretending. You have practiced learning to love your city. You have practiced learning to care for those who are not him. His shoulders are thin and they do not deserve to bear the entire weight of your life, your very reason for living.

You have practiced for so long that it comes to you like second nature, so sincere that you can almost believe in it yourself.

When the girl comes into your life, when you leave Jedha again, this time with him beside you, you look at her and tell yourself that you must see her as she truly is. You must not make that mistake you once made, when you looked at him and saw someone else.

But you see only yourself in her: a version of you that you have always imagined, a version of you that has never met him. Between a selfishly-rich man’s son and an Imperial scientist’s daughter, differences are so minor they can be dismissed. It makes things easier, somehow.

You have practiced and practiced. But when you call her ‘little sister,’ your eyes still slant towards him to catch his smile. 

*

_The Rebel ships roar overhead, and you laugh._  
  
Your anger at your city’s destruction surprises even you.

It is not because of his grief. He hides his grief so deep within him that even you can only see the threads of it coiling in the tensed muscles of his arms and the deep, pain-carved lines around his eyes. Your anger grows at the sight of it but it has already existed without him.

Jedha has been dying for so long that this should be a mercy, bringing nothing but relief. But you have practiced loving your city for so long that you have actually succeeded. Less surprising is that you only know after you have lost it.

There is no love that you hold for the rebels. Saw Gerrera had only worsened matters on Jedha, increased the suffering and pain and death, and the moon of your rich history has never mattered to the rest of the Alliance. 

But there is rage within you. But there is grief within him. Your rage has always been coupled with a need to destroy, the two as welded to each other as you are to him. 

Destruction comes to you easily; you have always learned quickly by watching. You feel the rage rising again when you realise that you might die, that he might die, without having accomplished anything because of some large, overwrought machine that has a name you don’t want to remember. 

He smiles when you laugh at the Rebel fighters soaring overhead. He smiles for he knows you and he loves you but there are parts of you that he does not want to see.

You laugh because you can hear the stormtroopers’ screaming. You laugh because now their suffering will match your rage. You laugh because now their suffering will match his grief.

You have learned to love your city but your heart is still wholly his. Surely.

Surely. 

*

_“Chirrut! Come back!_

__You do not take your eyes away from him, but still he slips from your fingers.

He walks into the fire. His every step is punctuated by the sound of blaster shots. You can smell the fire from here, hidden in safety.

He is praying. He is smiling.  
 _  
“Come!”_

__All of your practice has been for naught. Your heart is not in your throat because your heart is out there, walking. His hands are clutched tight over his staff. Even from here, even as the blasters blaze around you, you can see the glittering shine of the kyber crystal on the tip - the last, the brightest, the rest abandoned or rejected – but it will not protect him.

You try. He does not need luck because he has you. He should not need the Force because he has you. You fire and fire. More corpses litter the field but still shots flow all around him. Some of them miss him by mere inches. There will be burns left on his skin.

He reaches the master switch.

For a moment, you allow yourself to hope.

_“Come with me!”  
_  
He falls. He falls, and your world is shifting beneath your feet. Sand dissipating into nothingness.

You run towards him. You run even though you know it is useless. You have seen too many people caught in grenade blasts like the one he was caught in, and you know that he only has minutes, perhaps seconds, to live.

Still, you run, because there is nothing else for you to do. You run, and you fall to your knees beside him. A part of you laughs, because has this not always been your place? Beside him, on your knees for worship?

*

_“Don’t go. Don’t go. I’m here. I’m here.”  
_  
When he reaches out for your face, you catch his hand. You are selfish: you do not want his last moments to be filled with the signs of your grief.

His hand has always been steady. Now it trembles.  
 _  
“It’s okay. It’s okay. Look for the Force—”_

_“Chirrut—”_  
  
For long years, you have been unfaithful. You have vowed to go where he went, but you have never managed to turn your head in the direction of the Force. Like a child with despised greens, you have looked in the opposite direction instead.

_“And you will always find me.”_

__He is leaving you. You can feel it in the loose way his hand is in yours, as if he has no more strength to even close his fingers.

Once, he asked you to leave him. But he has never left you. Even while you walked alone during those endless years, he was with you. He has always been with you: in your heart and mind, his silhouette imprinted on the back of your eyelids.

He is leaving you and now he asks you again to believe. You have been unfaithful for so long because you can’t.

But this is the last time. For his sake, you can pretend. You must.

You must.

_“The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force.”_

__You know that he is not fooled. He does not have the strength to change his expression but you know, nonetheless. He is etched in your heart, and every shift in what he feels tugs on it. Your heart that beats only for him.

You know that he hopes, nonetheless. He clings to hope with fingers as grasping as those you have; those you use to cling to him.

He hopes and you love him and so you pretend, over and over again.

_“The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force.”  
_  
His chest is moving shallower and shallower with each breath. He is dying and there is nothing you can do about it. 

Inanely, you remember that the Captain you pretended caring about had called you his guardian. The Captain is right and you have failed. A guardian is supposed to protect but you cannot protect him.  
 _  
“The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force.”_

__He stops breathing as the last word leaves your lips.

There is no anger left in you. Anger requires a heart. Yours has died with him.

You stand up. You power up your cannon, and you shoot. You shoot with an abyss in your eyes; the abyss that the world has turned into because his death has taken the ground from your feet and you’re falling.  
 _  
“The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force.”_

__Light explodes in the distance. The pilot, the one other person who shares in your and his grief for your city, is dead. Once more, you try for anger. You try for grief. You have nothing.

There is nothing left inside you. You have died with him.

When the grenade comes, you know you can kick it away. There is time.

You turn to look at him instead. The sight of him, laid out on the sand. There is dirt on his cheeks. The curve of his fingers on the sand is so beautiful it almost makes you weep.

In your mind, you pray one last time.  
 _  
“The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force.”_

__The Force is not kind. The Force is no equaliser. You have called him a fool a thousand times for serving and worshipping something that has brought him only suffering. You are faithless for you are selfish. You are faithless because you love him, you believe in him; he has given you so much, he has built you a world, so what need do you have for anything else?

He has told you to look for the Force. You are looking for the Force. For the first time in years, you are looking _at_ the Force.

Finally, you have fulfilled your vow completely. Your face is turned towards the same direction as his.

You look for the Force to find him.

_End  
_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case it is unclear, this chapter is entirely from Baze’s POV, written in the same style and second-person POV as Chirrut’s sections in the last four chapters with the formatting reversed.
> 
> The story of the lovers who turned to butterflies is a Chinese legend called _The Butterfly Lovers/Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yintai_. Apparently I can’t write a fic without reference at least one myth or something.
> 
> Honestly, I wrote this fic and I genuinely still don’t know what it is, much less how to judge its quality. Also, fightbackfic requires me to write 2k words and I ended up writing nearly _twelve times_ that amount. I really don’t even know anything anymore.
> 
> Please feed me comments about what you think. ♥

**Author's Note:**

> I can be found @[evocating](evocating.tumblr.com) where I shriek over Donnie and Jiang Wen and babble about Chinese culture a lot. 
> 
> Feed the starving author some comments. Thank you!


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